


A Kiss, Just for Fun

by Jillypups



Series: Kissing Starks [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Benjeera, But have I ever even tried?, F/M, Fluff, I Made A Thing, I can't help myself, I don't even care at this point, Ohhh boy, Romance, Sonoitaverse, kiss the girl universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-13 21:01:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3396200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/pseuds/Jillypups
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Sansa, Margie and Arya go home from their night out in Seattle, Meera is left to her own devices before returning to Spokane in a few days. Benjen stops by to drop off the stilettos she kicked off and forgot in his car the previous evening. </p><p>I WONDER WHAT HAPPENS.</p><p>Kiss The Girl universe, as they all are these days lol.<br/>(Meera is 27, Benjen 45)</p><p>ALSO Don't kill me for adding the Sandor/Sansa tag. I only did because several SanSan shippers out there expressed an interest in Benjen and Meera and there is just no way anyone would find this. Bex and Littleimagination said I could do it!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [michael1280](https://archiveofourown.org/users/michael1280/gifts), [janelrenee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janelrenee/gifts).



> This fic is for both Janelrenee (the inspiration) and Michael1280 (the major, major help with life in Seattle) on Tumblr. Thank you so much, lady and gentleman, respectively!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/111527689763/a-kiss-just-for-fun-benjen-x-meera-fic-after)

It has started to rain, the kind of drizzle that leaves beads of moisture on wool and makes everything seem fuzzy, the kind of drizzle that makes the air look and feel the way Benjen imagines the inside of a cloud must. He loves it. It’s not the rain that makes him linger in his car late on a Friday morning, not when he’s grown up with the feel of it catching under the collars of his shirts, not when he’s lived his entire life with the comforting scent of wet asphalt. No, it is the pair of high heels on the front passenger seat of his Suburban that gives him pause, a pair of jet black stilettos; four inch heels, two straps of leather and not much else. They are delicate and dangerous and he has glanced down at them more times than he cares to admit on the drive over here.

They are a classic example of what the guys down at the station call fuck me shoes and he is inclined to agree. The last time he saw them being worn was on Meera Reed last night when she and the rest of the girls came traipsing out of a bar downtown towards his car. They were a gaggle of giggling  _Thank yous_ , the  _clickclickclick_ of half a dozen pairs of fuck me shoes when he got out and opened the passenger side doors for them. She was loose limbed and laughing in a short black dress, wearing these sky high murder shoes without so much as a stumble. Still, she took no time kicking them off in the car after she whooped  _Shotgun_  and wriggled her way up into the seat. It’s where she left them, either too drunk to remember or too comfortably barefoot to care, and it’s why he’s here parked in the sleepy street outside Jon and Ygritte’s house where she’s staying for the week.

Benjen hesitates another couple of beats before chuckling at himself, and he hooks his index and middle fingers under the thin straps of the shoes and gets out of the car, shutting the door behind him as he crosses the street in the rain. He briskly takes the steps up to the covered porch of his son’s bungalow and gives the door two sharp knocks before he steps back and waits. The soft patter of rain on the porch roof above him is like the buzz of television static, and it’s a lull that distracts him as he glances down at the high heels with a sort of faraway amusement.

There’s the sound of footsteps on floorboards and a loud thump followed by a soft  _Goddammit_   and then the owner of the shoes opens the door. Meera is breathless and dressed only in a robe the blue of midnight with cherry blossoms sprayed across it, and she looks irritated until her eyes lift to his. There is that brief moment where recognition is a spark and flicker, that moment where a struck match sputters before flaring to life, and then she smiles.

“Benjen,” she says with a relieved sigh, and she opens the door wider than the crack she previously allowed, resting her shoulder against the frame. Her eyes are green and lively, an easy and welcome distraction from the plunge of her robe’s neckline. “I thought it was the delivery guy again. Your son basically spends all his time buying books on Amazon, and the UPS guy has been here every day since I arrived,” and now it’s his turn to smile as he lifts the shoes up and between them, and they are an elegant dangle from his crooked fingers.

“I guess I’m the Shoe-PS guy, then,” he says. She stares open mouthed up at him, long enough to make him feel stupid for such a bad joke, before she finally laughs. It’s a head-tossing thing and it bounces the tangle of ringlets around her face, making him think of rumpled sheets and crossword puzzles on Sundays, but that could be her silk robe and bare feet talking, too.

“Sorry about that, leaving them in your car. There’s only so much I can handle in shoes like these, and I guess I forgot them on purpose,” she says, pushing off the frame with her shoulder and taking the shoes from him, her fingers brushing his as she hooks the heel straps the same way he did, and they hang from her hand as she turns and walks into the house. “I made too much coffee, you want a cup?” Meera tosses the shoes on the end table by the sofa where she’s clearly sleeping, judging by the pillow and blankets and the fact that Robb and Talisa are using the guest room before the sale on their house is final.

“Sure,” he says, watching her walk into the kitchen before he steps in and closes the door.

His son lived in a Spartan studio apartment before falling in love and moving in with Ygritte, who is a whirlwind of a woman. It’s a world of color and mismatched furniture he walks into, a cheerfully untidy house that smells like Nag Champa. Dozens of plants hang from macramé in front of the windows of the living room, and those aforementioned books fill the built in shelves that flank the fireplace. Music plays from the stereo wedged between paperbacks and comics, and the voice of Nina Simone is a drift and swank and croon.

“Is everyone working today?” he says conversationally as he enters the kitchen, smiling as he lays eyes on her.

She’s got her back to him, stands on her tiptoes as she reaches in vain for a mug on the top shelf of a cupboard, and with two strides he’s behind her, picking a mug and lowering it to her. He feels bizarrely overdressed here in this world of morning and coffee and bathrobes and uncombed hair, here where he stands in a pair of jeans and rained on hiking boots.

“Thanks,” she says with a grin and a roll of her eyes, and she pours coffee in the mug he’s handed her, gives it back to him before topping off her own. “And yeah, they’re working the rest of the week, and I think Ygritte’s taking a hiking tour on an overnight trip this weekend. I’ve been kind of bored, to be honest.” They stand in identical poses, leaning back against the counter as they face the stove, blowing on their mugs.

“Bored in  _this_ city? Impossible,” he says before taking a swallow of coffee.

Meera huffs at him, tells him Arya, Sansa and Margie already went back to Spokane this morning and it’s just her now, waiting around an empty house until her plane takes off on Monday. _The drive is beyond boring,_ she adds, _I’d rather go broke for a plane ticket._

“Still, you could walk around and explore the neighborhood. Take the bus downtown, I don’t know.”

He shrugs, feels the strange mingle of uneasiness and comfort standing around his son’s kitchen when he isn’t home, talking to a woman he’s only met a handful of times. It almost makes him laugh when he realizes it’s the jingle jangle of nerves from being alone in the company of a woman; he’s never been what’s called a ladies man, and it’s been more than a few months since the last date he went on.

“Easy for  _you_  to say, Mr. Seattle. I’d probably get lost without a tour guide,” and then she’s eyeing him slyly over the rim of her cup before she sips her coffee, and Benjen laughs and shakes his head.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says, setting down the coffee to cross his arms over his chest, turning to face her in full, the counter a press against his hip.

She’s nearly a full foot shorter than he is but is no less a firecracker for the difference in height, and she mirrors him, hip to the counter, arms folded across her chest, the silk of her sleeves a slide against the silk beneath her breasts. He lifts his eyes to hers and she is a persuading smile and wide green eyes.

“Oh come on, you clearly have the day off and I bet you would have fun showing me around. You could, you know, show me all of your haunts or whatever.  _Please_ don’t make me sit around all day, Benjen, I’ll go  _insane_ ,” she says with relish, lifting one arm so she can grip him by the arm, her small hand a squeeze on his bicep for pleading emphasis.

She is an intelligent woman, clever and irreverent in her humor; he knows from her jokes and comments last night in the car when he drove them all home. She’s attractive in a fey, indefinable way, all smirk and scrutiny and wit. There are far worse fates for him than spending the day with a woman like Meera Reed, though he sighs heavily when he says  _All right, fine_ , keeps his amusement largely to himself when she whoops a  _Thank you_  before letting Jon and Ygritte’s dog Ghost in from the backyard, a drizzle-drenched white mutt that sprays her with rainwater when he shakes himself off.

“Here, let me,” he says, knowing his way around well enough to find the ratty old bath towels they keep in the mudroom for such an occasion.

He squats down to ruffle Ghost’s fur while Meera stands beside him, her bare calves pale in the white rainy light coming in through the kitchen window. There’s a wild urge to close his fingers around a narrow ankle and run the touch upwards. He clears his throat and stands, blaming the robe, the sweet, ever-present scent of incense, the lack of eligible women at the firehouse, the only place he goes with any regularity.

“Be warned, though: I’m a boring old guy, and I’m not so sure my haunts will be up to snuff for you,” he says when the deed is done and Ghost is a tail wag out of the kitchen.

Benjen follows her into the front room where she crouches down to dig through her suitcase for clothes to change into.

“Well, crappy dad jokes aside, you don’t seem  _that_  old,” she quips over her shoulder as she heads to the bathroom with jeans and a shirt thrown over her shoulder. He ignores the electric blue strap of a bra dangling out from beneath her jeans. “Though it  _was_  a pretty bad joke.”

“Yeah, but I  _am_ a dad, it comes with the territory. Besides, you laughed your ass off,” he calls out after she closes the door, and he chuckles and shakes his head at the second peal of her laughter that rings out, runs his finger along the inner sole of one of those high heels as he walks past the sofa to wait for her by the door.

 

He’s an easy guy to talk to, is a little on the quiet side though he has no problem sparring back with his words if she goads him. In that way he reminds her of her brother, sets her at ease immediately despite the catlike tilt of his eyes, the way his gaze makes her think of sultry words like smolder. She finds herself telling him about herself far sooner than she usually does with other people, preferring to open up well after she’s assured it’s a person worth her while. She tells him about her degree in Library Science and how she works for the library at Spokane Community College, how she loves traveling for the experience as much as she loves it for the happy relief she feels when she’s back in her own space again. She tells him about her cat she named Frogger because of the weird way he sticks his tongue out, finds she is oddly proud when that makes him laugh.

Benjen drives and points out landmarks of his own history; his old elementary school and the park where he busted his lip botching a jump from the top of the monkey bars while trying to impress a girl in high school. He tells her he graduated with a double major in Literature and Philosophy, and his favorite author is Steinbeck though he admits to her in a low conspiratorial voice that he gets a kick out of Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ every time he reads it, and she tells him it’s one of her favorite books.

“And then out of the blue you decided to become a firefighter?” she says a few moments later with some confusion, paints a verbal picture of him quoting Nietzsche as he slides down a firemen’s pole, and he laughs, bracing his hand on the back of her seat as he checks his blind spot before merging onto the interstate.

“Yeah, well, they were all out of jobs at the philosophy factory, I guess,” he says with a grin as he glances at her, and she laughs despite the corniness of the joke, or maybe because of it.

It’s too foggy for a trip up the Space Needle to do much good so he takes her downtown to walk the streets of a city he holds near and dear to his heart. He’s a long legged stroll in a North Face rain jacket with his hands in his pockets, a masculine casualness that makes her think of well-worn flannel and unfinished wood furniture. She’s got her curly hair in a high bundle on her head and a thick knobby scarf wrapped around her neck above a pea coat, is thusly impervious to the misty drizzle from the pea soup sky above them.

“There’s something charming about walking in the rain, I don’t care how much of a cliché it is,” she says as they wait for the pedestrian light on a street corner in a sea of Seattleites.

Half of the crowd text on their smartphones, the other stand with their earbuds in and distance in their gazes, and it is that bizarre sensation of big city isolation she’s felt before. She is grateful for his company, that she’s not by herself on this little field trip, grateful that it’s him with his easy personality and his affable smiles.

“Yeah?” he looks down at her.

She nods and he smiles, his cat eyes a crinkle as he sweeps a hand through his damp hair before lowering it down into a light press against the back of her elbow when the light changes. It’s gentlemanly and polite and old fashioned, and she wonders if it’s a chivalric gesture or a paternal one.

“Yeah,” she says, testing him out, because he’s good looking and he makes her laugh, because she’s on vacation and she’s never one to waste an opportunity. Meera moves her elbow away from that light touch of his fingertips, draws back to link her arm with his; the hurried pace of the surrounding crowd her excuse as she tugs him along. “It’s kind of romantic, don’t you think?”

Benjen’s arm stiffens momentarily at the cling of her hand to his jacket sleeve before it bends and he gives her hand the rise of his forearm to rest upon, and she happily takes him up on the offer. He glances down to her and she looks up at him in the rain, watches him study her, blue eyes a flit and flicker across her face, and then he laughs.

“Yeah, I think you could say that,” he says, and there is a thrill and spark of victory, a little leap of excitement in her over his light reply.  His strides slow down to match hers, and she resists the urge to bite her lip and grin like a school girl at this advancement, at the heat of him she can feel through his jacket with her bare, chilled fingers.

“So where are we going?” she asks.

He tells her they’re headed to the famous Pike Place Market, and it’s a cacophony when they get there, a riot of color and sound and smell. They walk the top level before drifting down and down and down. There are shouts of merchants and customers, conversation and laughter, sizzling of woks and skillets. There is the rainbow of produce and flowers and cuts of fish, the blur of fast-moving patrons, the flash of tourists’ cameras. There is the heat from so many bodies, the warmth from so many griddles and chafing dishes, and there is the heat and press of Benjen at her side. His laid back, effortless way of being is more on display here than it has been all day. She’s drawn like an overwhelmed moth to the mellow flame of him, a lost soul to sanctuary, and it’s not until they’ve been browsing and roaming for almost twenty minutes that she realizes she’s clinging to him like a damsel, both her hands clutching his bent elbow.

“Sorry,” she says hastily, fingers loosening and sliding off his arm, but then his left hand lifts and presses on top of hers, a cool touch, still and gentle but fully intentional. “It’s just um, you know,” she drifts, and he’s already looking at her when she lifts her gaze up at him.

“It’s intense,” he offers, letting his hand cup over hers a moment before he removes it.

“Wonderfully intense, yes,” she says, voice raised above the squabble and squall around them. Everything is either mouthwatering or eye catching and often times both, and when they pass a vendor selling exquisite cuts of fish, jewel tone ahi and salmon the color of a cameo brooch, she stops them in their tracks. “We should get something and cook it up.”

“You like to cook?” he asks lightly as she lets her eyes roam the extensive selection.

It’s a far quieter stall than the famous fish-throwing place, and so she tells him she does, that playing with spices and herbs is the best part. He tells her he loves it, that he taught his son and between the two of them they keep the men down at the station well fed.

“So first it’s Nietzsche and now it’s Julia Child? Be still my beating heart,” she says, and he rolls his eyes as he sends an amused smile down to her.  “We should totally get something, these are all mouthwatering. That halibut is looking at me like it’s in love with me."

He’s a blue eyed shadow when she glances back at him and he’s flush behind her, leaning over her shoulder to study the halibut. Her breath catches in her throat and he slides his gaze her way. They are close enough to kiss, and if she turns her head fully to the side, she could make it happen.

“You know, with the kind of love connection you two have, it would be a shame not to get the halibut. I hate to stand in the way of kismet.”

His eyebrows flick upwards once, just once, before he straightens to his full height, getting the attention of the vendor and asking for a 12 ounce fillet. He is still standing close behind her, as much a claim on her as it is a signal for others to stay away, and Meera finds herself lightheaded from the exchange. She closes her eyes, gives herself time to catch her breath, though her heart has run away with her pulse.

“ _Oh_ my God, oysters,” she says when she opens her eyes, forcing her attention onto anything except the closeness of him, the height of him, that teasing flick of his eyebrows.  She points to the row of stony looking shells that are half buried in jagged chunks of ice.

“I know what you want,” Benjen says as he buys the halibut, taking the plastic sack full of ice and fish, and he is cat with cream and a boyish smile when she bites her lip and looks up at him. He shrugs. “Buying oysters here and taking them home is _nothing_ to eating them fresh at the bar,” and she gusts out a laugh, resists the urge to fan herself at his words and where they dragged her thoughts.

“There’d better be a martini at this oyster bar,” she says as he steers them through a warren of pathways and stairs, back to the main entrance of the market.

They tell each other the martini they prefer. He is Bombay Sapphire with a twist, she is Grey Goose with vermouth and olives, and it’s precisely what they order at Kells Irish Pub, knees nearly brushing as they sit and eat oysters at the end of a long, wooden bar.

“Well, you’re right, those were delicious,” she says over her martini, eyes on him as she takes a sip. There is something wickedly decadent about oysters and drinks at four in the afternoon and about sharing them with Benjen Stark, slant-eyed and conspiratorial as he looks at her. “Just what I wanted.”

“Good,” he says, twisting on his stool to face her now that they are finished with the meal, his left elbow on the bar as he pushes his martini glass to and fro on the polished wood surface. She mirrors his posture and now their knees do touch, cap to cap, and they neither of them move to separate. “I would hate to steer you wrong.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s possible,” she says.

He raises his eyebrows, watches as she bites the olive off of its pick, chews and swallows it.

“I mean, at least where oysters are concerned."

He laughs.

She asks him about his job and the scariest situations he’s ever been in, and tells her of one house fire where they couldn’t find a young child in any of the rooms, how he and a colleague ran through the flames, fear and panic building, only to discover she had fled to her treehouse in the backyard.

“All that worry for nothing, but I’d go through it all over again for such an outcome,” he says, and she’s got the image of him in a fireman’s outfit holding a soot-covered child in one arm and an axe in the other, and _Wow_ slips out of her mouth before she can help herself. Benjen takes a swallow of gin and leans into her. “You’re imagining me in my turnout gear, aren’t you?” She grins.

“Busted. Do you have the um, you know, the suspenders? The big bad boots and _please,_ tell me you have an axe.” He closes his eyes and laughs, shakes his head as he leans it into his left hand.

“Yeah, all of that,” he says, and she hums with approval. “It’s just a uniform, though, nothing special.”

“Oh please,” she waves him off, is utter disbelief at this display of humility. She sips her drink and spins the olive pick between her fingers, gazing at it. “You _have_ to know women find firefighters extremely sexy,” she says, lifting her eyes to find him looking at her mouth. Meera grins and he meets her gaze with a raised eyebrow and a one shouldered shrug.

“That sentiment is usually reserved for the young bucks at the station, not guys like me.” It’s a ridiculous statement but she’s not going to argue with him; humble men have always turned her on far more than the swagger and strut of these so called young bucks. She should know, considering how many she’s dated and how many she’s dumped after a single date.

“Well,” she says, leaning in, “ _my_ sentiment is not thusly reserved, believe me.”

The gaze they share is a lockdown, a party of two, a bolt of lightning, and she suppresses the urge to shiver. He is too much fun to tease, too much fun to laugh with, and far too easy to flirt with.

“Yeah, well, you’re one to talk,” and here she frowns because he’s lost her, and she is about to remind him that she has no work uniform when his gaze slides to the side and he grins. “Sexy librarian? They make Halloween costumes out of women like you."

 _He’s calling me sexy_ scampers around in her mind like a rambunctious fawn but instead of grin like she wants to, she simply sniffs and shrugs.

“Maybe those costumes are what I wear to work every day,” she says, and he sits up straight, clutches at his heart, mimes cardiac arrest with his head sagged back and his eyes closed. “Oh, no! Quick, where’s his pacemaker?” she says.

She's half laughing as she reaches out and pats up and down his chest with both hands, in mocking search of such a device, and the firm give of muscle there does not escape her attention, and neither does the look he’s giving her. It’s amused and unwavering, it’s sexy and it makes her want to lick her lips, makes her wonder what he can do with his mouth, and he’s got one of those half smiles when she parts her lips. But then it’s gone, a flicker and sputter of heat and chemistry before it fades to disbelief and shock as his eyes move from hers to somewhere beyond her shoulder.

“No shit,” he says under his breath, a sigh gusting on the tail end of his words. “Unbelievable.”

“What? What is it,” she asks, turning on her stool to look behind her, but he snares her attention whip crack fast when he rests a hand on her knee; a plea not to glance back, plain as day. Meera spins back around to look at him, and there is a more sober expression on his face than there was just a few seconds ago. “What’s wrong, Benjen?”

“My ex-wife is over there with some friends. Ex-friends, I should say, considering she got them in the divorce,” he says dryly, dropping his gaze to his martini which he lifts and drinks. “I haven’t seen her in probably over a year.”

“Talk about a buzzkill,” she murmurs, running a finger along the wide, wide rim of her glass, watching the movement before looking back up at him. “Was it a rough, I mean, was it a bad break?”

It’s soft as she can make it though it’s still undeniably nosy, is probably inappropriate all things considered, but she can’t quite help herself here, not with him. Meera is relieved when he smiles and shakes his head, when he offers himself up.

“No, it wasn’t cruel or angry, just the sad truth that happens sometimes. No yelling, no affair, nothing like that. She fell out of love with me, that’s all.”

He is a slow steady constant; that much is clear. It’s in the relationship he maintains with his son and his unflappable, unruffled demeanor. _Maybe some women find that boring,_ she muses as she gazes at him, as he returns it with a frankness that comes with age and not overconfidence. _I’m not one of those women, though,_ and she sits forward, because there is slow burn intensity to that steadiness that she can pick up on, a deepness she’d like to dive into. She rolls the dice.

“Are _you_ still in love with _her_?” and he chuckles, rolls his eyes and finishes his drink before looking back at her.

“No, Meera, I’m not still in love with her,” he says. “I don’t love her and I haven’t for a long, long time,” and then she grins, looks at his mouth, wonders how soft the scruff on his chin will be against hers.

“Good,” she says.

She leans in close-close, her right hand gripping the edge of the bar for support as she kisses him, a simple, easy thing of closed mouths and the taste of juniper and lemon, the salt of olives and the ocean. He is the barest tilt of his head into her, is stillness itself when the kiss breaks, though she stays near to gauge the reaction.

“What are you doing?” His voice is already the deep timbre of a grown man but now it’s lower and darker, edged with something that makes her heart beat faster than the kiss did.

“Having fun,” she whispers, and she hums with a smile when there is the slow drift of his other hand on her right knee, and now she’s ensnared. “Are _you_ having fun?”

It’s a question and invitation and confession, and her heart pounds for the answer, the reply, the reception.

Benjen kisses her.

He is unwavering and take-your-time, each slide of his tongue inside her mouth a stroke of patience and remarkable self-mastery, and she feels like a wild animal being coaxed into a clearing with each taste of him. Goosebumps and shivers are a rise and quake when his hands move, fingers sliding down the outsides of her legs, tucking into the bends of her knees as his thumbs move in tiny circles just above her kneecaps. Lightest of touches and halfway innocent in their meandering, they are still more than enough to make her sigh between kisses, to make her scoot to the edge of her seat to get closer to him.

Hands down, this is a better day than she ever could have imagined when Benjen Stark knocked on the door, rain in his hair, her high heels in the intimate snare of his fingers.

 

It’s been around a year since he’s seen his ex-wife El, but the sight and memory of her are blown away like dust off a mirror when he kisses Meera. She is warm and it feels like she is smiling, even when she pushes against his tongue with her own. _That’s what she is at the end of the day, a smile, the laughter after the punchline,_ he thinks, and he likes her for it, very much. The swell and din of the small crowd around them fade, the slow downturn of volume a result of her fingers in his hair at the nape of his neck, the small sound in the back of her throat that is more moan than sigh. It strikes him that they are making out in a bar, and he chuckles against her mouth because it is something he has not done in 20 years.

“What’s so funny,” she breathes, breaking the kiss to rest her forehead against his, and because it’s been so easy talking to her all afternoon, he tells her the truth.

“I haven’t kissed a woman in a bar since I was in college and _that_ was a long time ago,” he says, drawing back to look at her. “Don’t remember it being quite so fun, though."

She hums, eyebrows lifting, ever the flirt, ever the smile. He was surprised when she came on to him as they crossed the street but he’s nobody’s fool, and he won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If she wants him, she can have him. _Having fun, indeed._

“You older men are so _good_. You know just what to say,” she says, sitting back and lifting her glass in one smooth movement, and she drains the last of her martini in one swallow.

He watches her throat bob, thinks of the pulse there, the beat it would make under the press of his mouth.

“Makes a girl wonder what else older men are good at,” she says, tipping her head to the side as she regards him, a dark brown ringlet dangling down from the pile of hair on the crown of her head.

She delights him, with her banter and her fearless gazes, the way she took his arm and how she bites her lip when she listens to him.

“You’ve only got to ask,” he says, squeezing her legs before sliding his hands off of her knees, and he is sorry for the loss of touch.

There is the lingering desire to pull her by the legs towards him, to pull her onto his lap, to feel the weight of her on top of him. It’s been a while since he has been with a woman, even longer since he has been with a woman so singular; he only hopes he can put his money where his mouth is, where he wants to put it. She huffs a laugh, looks at the nails on one hand, speaks to her cuticles.

“Maybe I don’t want to be told. Maybe I want to be shown,” she murmurs, and her words are a sweet wine that makes his blood rush.

He may be out of practice and he may not kiss in bars so often anymore, but even he knows what she’s telling him. If he’s expected to be the gentleman here, _Well_ , _I’m probably going to disappoint her,_ because there is no way in hell he’s saying no to her.

“Bold as brass, aren’t you,” he says quietly.

She lifts her eyes to him, leans in and braces her hands on his thighs. She’s removed the thick scarf she wore outside and his eyes follow the line of her slender throat to the curve of her jaw, watches her mouth as she speaks.

“Bolder, if you can believe it."

She kisses him again, and this time he cups her face with one hand, knows now the softness of her skin as he runs a thumb along her cheekbone. Her brazen words work him up as much as her touch, the dig of her fingers into the flesh of his thighs, the brush of her lips against his as she speaks.

“Aren’t you going to make me dinner? I’d hate your purchase to go to waste,” she says, and he laughs, kisses her again with a little more hunger that has nothing to do with the discussion of their next meal.

“Gonna keep me busy all day, hmm?” he says, and now she slides off her stool to stand between his cocked out knees, her hands still on his thighs as she looks up at him now, petite as she is.

“All night too, if we’re lucky,” she says.

Yes the sun has just barely set, yes it’s more a restaurant than a bar this early in the evening, but he doesn’t care, not with enticement after enticement, morsel after morsel, breadcrumb after breadcrumb. Benjen kisses her, harder now, more force coming from inside him because he’s got her whimper to goad him on, and he doesn’t stop until someone clears their throat beside them.

“Very lucky,” he says before glancing up, expecting to get made fun of by an employee or told off by some over-righteous patron, but he is stunned to see his ex-wife standing there, glancing and staring with ill-disguised surprise.

“Ben,” she says, making his name sound like a question, a foreign word she’s never before heard. “I thought it was you, although I wasn’t um, I wasn’t sure.” She is dark hair and grey eyes, as pretty as she always was, though after faded feelings and silent treatments, after divorce papers and splitting up belongings, it’s a beauty that fails to impress, these days.

“El, hey there,” he says, and he can see the curiosity building up in her as she keeps glancing to Meera, but there is no way he is going from kissing a woman for the first time to introducing her to his ex-wife. Benjen stands and tosses a few bills on the bar to cover food, drinks and tip. “We were just leaving, feel free to take our seats, if you want,” he says, ignoring Dacey and Alysane as he puts an arm around Meera, who slides in close to his body after shrugging back into her coat and winding the scarf around her throat.

“Come on, baby, let’s go make dinner,” she practically purrs as she presses her cheek against his chest, and he has to suppress a snort of laugher as he grabs the halibut and they edge past his ex-wife, and by the time they make it to the alleyway entrance of the pub they’re both laughing.

“’Come on, baby,’” he says with another laugh and a shake of his head. “Very nice,” he says, and she wraps an arm around the low of his back, steps in close as he draws tighter the arm around her shoulder.

He is giddy from the interaction and lighthearted from the afternoon, is a stoke of heat from her forward words and the promise of what’s looking like to be an evening well spent.

“It was too tempting, I’m sorry, I couldn’t hold back,” she says.

He stops her on a street corner even though the light is green, despite the jostle and bustle of people around them. She winds her arms around his neck when he inclines his head to whisper to her, to kiss her amidst the splash of tires through puddles, the flash and sweep of headlights, the descending chill he intends to work out of her skin once they’re alone.

“Don’t hold back. Not if we’re supposed to be having fun," and she grins against his mouth. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/111962610133/a-kiss-just-for-fun-chapter-2-feels)

“Let me guess,” she says as she pushes her fingers through his, stealing his cigarette with one smooth slide. “You sit out here reading  _The Grapes of Wrath_ , sipping wine as the sun sets.” She inhales a single drag and pulls it deep in her lungs, tips her head back to look at his porch ceiling as she exhales, smiles as he lets loose his low, long laugh and runs his hand up her leg.

They are rocking back and forth on the swing on his back porch, Benjen’s long legs powering the to and fro of it as Meera reclines with the curve of her calves resting in his lap. The rain has abated for now, leaving a heavy cloak of fog and humidity in its place, and the Tiffany style light cover by his back door casts them in its muted glow, a little world of porch and swing and coffee table.

“Not quite,” he says, deftly stealing away the cigarette as his head sags against the back of the swing.

He told her he rarely smokes but the situation called for it, and though she usually reserves cigarettes for bar patios at 2am, she couldn’t agree more. He takes a drag and he takes his time, something she’s getting used to, and in the lull it takes him to gather his thoughts she closes her eyes and remembers.  _A trail of their clothes from front door to living room, the bag from Pike Place tossed into the fridge as she kicked off her shoes, the whimper she couldn’t tamp down when he rounded on her, pointing down the hall as he aimed his gaze at her and said "Bedroom."_  She’s never backed into a room with so much giddy anticipation.

“Oh?” She stretches her legs out over his lap, breathes deep when one hand skates up her shin and over her knee, and a riot of gooseflesh crops up in the wake of his touch. She opens her eyes in time to watch him suck in a lungful of smoke before blowing it out and up like a birthday wish against some unseen candle, and that makes her smile. “What did I get wrong?”

“Bourbon, usually, and don’t you dare tell anyone, but it’s yesterday’s comics out of the newspaper. Sorry to disappoint,” he says, head tipping so his cheek rests against the swing as he hands the cigarette back to her, cat-slant eyes squinting, and there’s no need for a smile to show his contentment. 

_His hands running up her back after her clothes were gone, save her bra, his low breathless "I knew it was blue" when he unhooked it, dragged the straps down her arms. The satisfied look on his face when she pushed him back onto his own bed._

“You’re an idiot if you can look at me and call me disappointed. I am  _definitely_ not disappointed,” she says from behind the cigarette.

Benjen laughs, lets his hand ride the rest of the track from knee down to thigh and under his t-shirt she’s in, letting it settle where hip dips down to belly. Her body lifts of its own accord under his touch, and he hums, turns his head to look back up at the ceiling.

“’Not disappointed.’ Good, good. I can put that one in my journal. March 13th, 2015. Exceptional woman in my bed for hours, emerges not disappointed. Had to pay $45 for halibut, but still immensely proud of self,” he says.

She laughs, her body bucking the swing from the force of it until he braces them against the sway.  _How is he so damned funny?_

“Dear diary, was ever so bored when dear Mr. Stark came to my rescue,” she says, and he squeezes her hip, his pinky a drift under the elastic of her panties.  _Fingers entwined together, the lift of his hips when she settled on top of him and he filled her up. How long his neck looked when he tilted his head back, how good "Yes" sounded through the clench of his jaws._

“Begged for oysters, demanded martini,” he says,  _Oofs_  when she lifts a leg and taps his stomach with the heel of her foot. “All right, all right,” he laughs, stealing what’s left of the cigarette, sitting up to pull in the last drag before tossing the butt into a coffee mug. His hand runs back up to her knee, all the way to her ankle, closing in with a squeeze.  _Her hands pinning his behind his head on the pillow, mouth open, that scruff of his between her breasts as she moved above him_. “Asked for tour of Seattle. Was given a, ouch, shit,” he says when Meera sits up and bites his shoulder. “Fine, fine, given whatever the hell she wants.”

“Dinner?”

He laughs.

“All right, dinner, then."

She sweeps her legs off his lap as they both stand, the swing a rock and buck against their legs.  _The feel of him between her thighs, the arch of her back as she drove her hips forward. "Come on, come for me," he said, and she responded, letting his hands free so they could find her waist as she rose up, head thrown back as she said "Yes."_

“You’re shivering, you’re probably freezing, come on,” he says when her wandering thoughts make her shudder, his hand taking her own with a light lace of his fingers between hers, and she bites her lip, tucks in her chin as he opens the door for her so he won’t see her blush and grin.

“Not freezing,” she says, walking through the kitchen to take a seat at one of two stools on the other side of counter. “Quite the opposite,” she says, gazing around the kitchen and through the wide doorless entry into the main room.

It’s a clean and orderly house but not lacking in personality; there is color and texture and books, books, books.  _He’s definitely Jon’s father with all these lovely books,_ she thinks. The kitchen is white and contemporary compared to the rest of the house, all clean lines and wooden countertops, and there are score marks in the smooth wood, ones she traces with a fingertip as she imagines him chopping shallots, mincing herbs here on the largest cutting board a man could have. She smiles, resting her chin in her hand as she shifts her gaze, watches him pad barefoot through his house. He reminds her of a skinny lion, maybe a coyote;  _something_  wild and ranging though he looks as domesticated as can be, picking up a remote in the living room and turning on the stereo, a hand through his hair as he tosses it back to the couch and turns towards her. Benjen smiles when he catches her watching him, his three day beard a wrinkle and his eyes a warm squint as he heads back into the kitchen.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, then. I have no qualms doing so,” and he pours her a glass of wine as “A Change is Gonna Come” fills the previously empty air, and it’s Otis Redding singing the lyrics, and Meera smiles.

“Smart man,” she murmurs, nodding her thanks as he passes her the glass, and she takes a long, slow sip, letting the dry red fill her mouth and wet her throat. He’s made her thirsty, hungry, hot and shivery, and now he’s making her dinner.

Benjen told her that he loves to cook and now she knows he can, and well; she is watching him dredge the divided halibut fillets first in flour and then in egg white whisked with horseradish before pressing them into breadcrumbs. He’s shirtless in an old pair of track pants and she tells him that together they make a complete outfit, and he grins, tells her pretty women wearing his clothes is his new favorite thing, and it does not escape her attention, that little word  _new._

“Good song, by the way,” she says, tipping her head towards the front room, and his gaze flicks up to her from his task.

He smiles and nods, places the coated fillets on a clean plate as he turns his back to her to wash his hands in the sink. She watches his shoulder blades move, one then the other as he scrubs his hands, and she wonders if she’ll get a chance to leave nail marks on his skin.  _Just one more taste before I have to leave._

“Favorite musician, Otis,” he says, ticking off a slew of others he enjoys, Sam Cooke and Al Green, Ray Charles and Bill Withers. They’re perfectly him in this house of his, that porch of his with the frequent curtain of mist that cloaks the city.

“I’m a Nina Simone kind of girl,” she says, drinking her wine, and he grins as he turns back to her, drying his hands on a dish towel before joining her, his head tilting back as he takes a swallow of pinot noir. “Billie Holiday, Etta James, Patsy Cline, those are my ladies.”

“I know,” he says with a nod. “I heard you playing Nina when I dropped off those shoes of yours. She’s good stuff, so it doesn’t surprise me."

They discuss their favorite songs as he puts her to work slicing red bell pepper and cutting broccoli florets from the crown. The conversation drifts like smoke from here to there, back to here and around in a circle. Their voices are joined by the sizzle of vegetables in olive oil and the hiss and crackle of fish in butter, and when his hands are busy stirring this and flipping that she lifts his wine glass for him, her arm a stretch to meet his height. She overshoots it and he snorts a laugh into his glass when a rivulet of wine slides down his chin, and Meera catches it with her thumb, watches him watching her as she sucks it off her skin.

“Jesus Christ,” he groans, tossing the spatula to the counter and turning to her.

It is a wonderful press against the stainless steel refrigerator when he kisses her, and she just manages to set the glass down before he lifts her up, the steel ticklish-cold against her back. “These Arms of Mine” rolls in from the living room and she sighs, head thunking back against the refrigerator.

“Benjen,” she pants when she wraps her legs around him, both hands in his hair as she rests her elbows on his shoulders and he lowers his mouth to her throat, and she obeys when he says  _Say it again._ “Benjen,” and she arches into him when his hand slides up under her shirt, cups a breast and squeezes, and it would only take two minor adjustments of clothing to get him inside her, and she’s thinking of nails on his back when the front door unlocks and opens.

“Hey, dad,” Jon says amidst the jingling of keys in the living room, and she is  _Oh my God, oh my God_ as she unhooks her ankles and slides down, yanking on his shirt to cover her panties as her feet touch back to earth. “Sorry to barge in but you didn’t pick up your phone, and I wanted to borrow that emergency car kit for Ygritte’s overnight trip tomorrow.” There are footsteps on the floorboards, each creak coming closer, and though it’s just Jon her heart’s beating like he’s a burglar breaking and entering.

“Fuck,” Benjen says, rubbing his face with a hand before inhaling sharply and spinning on his heels, stepping quickly to hide his arousal behind the kitchen counter, and he is just in time to register the look of unadulterated shock on his son’s face.  

Jon stands there with his mouth hanging open at the bizarre sight of his cousin’s boyfriend’s sister standing half naked next to his father at 8pm on a Friday night.

“Meera? What’re you,” and then his gaze drifts down to where Benjen’s Station #21 shirt hangs to the tops of her thighs, and it’s nothing but bare leg from hem to her painted toenails. “I- wait a minute, wait a minute. Ygritte said you uh,” he says, stammering, snapping his fingers as he points to Meera, trying to find the words here in this world of his that’s been turned on its head. “You texted her saying you were going sightseeing.”

“Well, I was. I mean, I did,” she says, eyebrows raised and eyes widened, and her shoulders lift in a shrug, in surrender, in a trailing off of words she has no idea how to say. 

 _And I wanted to fuck your dad? Ygritte’s lucky if that’s something in the gene pool, because he’s an amazing lay?_ Meera claps a hand over her mouth at the thought, unable to suppress the giggles that are coming out of her, endless peals of them like she’s an animated squirrel in some children’s movie. Benjen glances back at her, initially incredulous, but once their eyes lock the corner of his mouth turns down in ill-disguised amusement.

“Yeah, she did,” Benjen says, turning back to his son and bracing his hands on the edge of the counter. “She wanted a uh, she wanted a tour, so you know, I helped,” and she doubles over, hugging herself as she laughs outright.

“Are you guys drunk? What the hell- you know, never mind, I don’t want to know. I’ll uh, I’ll just get the kit out of the uh, the whatever, the garage,” Jon says, striding through the kitchen to the back door, and she stands up, catches her breath as he passes her by, his eyes a flick down to her bare legs. “Jesus, dad,” he mutters, and she’s a wordless string of giggles all over again.

“Damn, the halibut,” Benjen says, fully self-possessed once more. and he turns to flip the fish and toss the vegetables.

“I don’t want to hear about your dirty sex dinner. I’ll go out through the driveway _,_ ” Jon snaps as he slams the door behind him.

Meera and Benjen snort their laughter in unison, and she sags against him as he puts his arm around her, kisses her temple as he turns off the gas to both burners. They neither of them speak as she pulls two plates from the exposed shelf of dishes in the corner, and Benjen divvies up the fish and vegetables between them. She grabs the wine and forks, follows him to the dining room where he sets the plates across from one another, and he grins when she sits with one heel propped against the edge of her seat.

It’s delicious; the texture of the fish is like butter wrapped in the tingle spice of the horseradish and the crunch of the crust, and the vegetables are crisp and lightly done. True to his word, he knows what he’s doing in more than one room in this house.

“Super yummy sex dinner, Benjen,” she says, and he laughs, his fork a clatter on his plate as he sits back, chews his food and swallows before speaking.

“Jesus, I am never going to hear the end of this,” he says. “First Dacey sees us at Kells,” he says, and when she looks at him with confusion he chuckles, shaking his head. “She was there with El, my ex wife. She’s married to Tormund, a friend of mine down at the station.  _He’s_ the friend I was allowed to keep, but only when it’s just us guys,” he says with a good-humored roll of his eyes.

“And now your son finds us in scandalous stages of undress,” she says, spearing red bell pepper on her fork.

“And now that, yeah. They’re going to think I’m having some sort of mid-life crisis or something,” he says with a swallow of wine. It’s hard to imagine him at mid-life but she supposes he is; she knows his age from earlier conversation. It didn’t bother her then and it doesn’t bother her now, but she wonders if it’s something weighing on him.

“And  _are_  you in crisis, Mr. Stark?” she says lightly, leaning back and bringing her wine with her once she’s swallowed her bite of food. Benjen chuckles.

“I’m in crisis only when you call me Mr. Stark. That’s my dad or my brother Ned, but it’s not me, I don’t care how old I get.”

“So our age difference doesn’t bother you then?”

He regards her keenly, blue eyes dark in the half-light here, leans over the table with his elbows on either side of his plate. He steeples his fingers and presses his mouth against the point of his index fingers.“No, Meera, it doesn’t bother me. Besides,” he says, and she loves it, being bathed in his gaze, the way he regards her like she’s a brain and a heart and not just the prize between her legs. “We’re having fun. Nothing should bother either of us, if we’re having fun.”

“No, nothing should,” she murmurs, and when he asks if she will sleep with him that night in his bed, stay until morning since everyone knows where she is anyways, she tells him yes.

It’s a tangle of arms and legs when she finally has the pleasure of running her nails down his back later that night, over the wings of his shoulder blades and along the narrow bands of muscle that flank his spine. They fall asleep with the music still playing, wake up to “Georgia on My Mind,” and they neither of them seem hungry enough to get out of bed. When Saturday stretches itself with a tousle-haired yawn into Sunday, she is still in his arms and in another of his shirts, their time together punctuated with coffee and sunsets and dark red wine, with takeout and showers and laughter. Sunday night ends with the chill of his clean, wet hair when he falls asleep on her as they stretch out watching a movie in the den, a wall of books behind them,  _It Happened One Night_ on the screen before them. She tugs him awake when it’s over so she can spend her last night in his bed, and when he drops her off the next morning, when he kisses her and licks into her mouth, when the feel of his scruff on her face is just a memory as she waits for her plane, Meera cannot stop smiling.

“Have a good vacation?” the flight attendant asks as she boards, and Meera laughs.

“Yeah, it was um, it was great. I had a lot of fun,” she says, and spends the short flight gazing sightlessly at the clouds outside her window.

 

It’s Wednesday before he has to go back in for a shift, and he’s hoping the few days will be long enough to let it all simmer and fade. He hasn’t spoken to his son, has only received a text telling him Jon returned the emergency kit to the garage, but Benjen is fairly confident at least Jon will keep mum, is vehemently hopeful that his silence will be enough to quash the locker room talk.

He is mistaken and his hopes are fruitless.

“Hey there, sex machine, you got any hot chicks to spare?” Grenn grins, balancing on the back two legs of his chair, wolf whistling as Benjen walks through the kitchen towards the locker room, and he cuffs his younger coworker on the back of the head.

Val, seated across the table from him, rolls her eyes and kicks Grenn’s chair, and his arms flail wildly as he regains his balance by the skin of his teeth.

“Shut up,” Benjen says lightly.

There is a bellowed  _STARK_ from down the hall towards the garage, and Tormund and Mance come swaggering in, boyish grins on their faces though they’re nearly as old as he is. They tail him into the locker room, elbows into each other’s ribs.

“Dace told me, man, you can’t hide it, you were sucking face with a college girl at a bar. Cute too, from what I hear, and then you disappear all weekend without answering a single one of my texts. Please tell me this means what I think it means."

Benjen turns away from him to hide his smile and shove his overnight bag in his locker. He’ll be here a full day and then be off a day for a total of five shifts before he has another six days off. Already it’s proving to be a long 24 hours.

“She’s not a college girl,” he says, and he hesitates because he shouldn’t feed his buddy’s appetite for sordid details and piggish commentary, but it’s too tantalizing, and he’s far too buzzed and wired and recharged from his weekend, from the afterglow of her hair in his hands and her mouth on his skin, the blooms of laughter that’s left little shadows and memories growing like wildflowers in his house. “She’s a librarian,” he adds finally, grinning and slamming his locker shut when Tormund and Mance both go  _No shit, brother_  in unison.

He suffers through the ritualistic ribbing and barrage of disgusting jokes, and he defends her honor with a cheerfully firm hand, insists she’s intelligent and witty and not just some brainless half-wit to roll around in the hay with, and the day is spent without incident after the novelty wears off. There is only one call out that night, right before 10pm, and when he returns from the false alarm and checks his phone, he is pleasantly surprised to find a flurry of texts from her.

**Meera:** Heard a joke and thought of you:

**Meera:** What did the clam say to the oyster when it wouldn’t give up the remote control?

**Meera:** Stop being so shellfish.

**Benjen:** Terrifically bad, I love it. Is this where I type LOL? How’s Spokane?

**Meera:** Your LOL was beautiful, dear. Spokane is terrifically boring. I can’t seem to find $45 halibut anywhere.

**Benjen:** I bet I could find it. Apparently I’m pretty good at that.

**Meera:** I dare you, buster.

“So this girl of yours,” Mance asks a few weeks later, sitting next to him at the bar in a beloved old dive they’ve been coming to since they started working together.

“She’s not my girl,” Benjen interrupts. “She’s a woman I slept with, a woman I had a lot of fun with. But she’s not mine.” 

 _She’s my friend,_  he thinks, hides a smirk when he thinks of the hilarious parries of texts last night when he told her that Jon has finally come to terms with the fact that his father has a sex life.  _Or did for a weekend,_ she’d told him.

“Fine, then. This  _woman_  who fucked your brains out,” Mance self-corrects with a swig of beer and a roll of his eyes. “How old are we talking here?”

“Twenties,” Benjen says, feigning interest in the game on the television hanging above three rows of dusty liquor bottles.

His phone buzzes in his pocket and he knows it’s her; they’ve been texting each other on and off for the past month, and while it’s sporadic he has never received so many texts since falling into bed with her. Eager as he is to check his phone, there is no way in hell he’s letting Mance get a glance at the screen if it is her.

“Closer to twenty or thirty?” Ben slides a look Mance’s way and the other man tips his head with a shrug. “Just curious, man, there’s no judgment coming from me.”

“Thirty,” Benjen says, raising a brow at him before turning back to the television screen. His pocket buzzes again, twice, and he excuses himself under the pretense of taking a piss to check his phone.

**Meera:** Are you busy?

**Meera:** I bet you’re busy, sorry

**Meera:** It’s just Osha isn’t answering and Jojen’s stupid phone is off and my dad’s overseas designing a bunch of restaurants in London and I have no one else to talk to

**Benjen:** I’m not busy, what’s up? Everything okay?

**Meera:** Frogger died

Benjen dials her number without a second thought.

“Hi.”

He winces when she answers her phone because it is clear that she’s been crying, and Benjen drains his beer before chucking the bottle in the trashcan by the front door, his hand over the receiver as he tells Mance something came up. He walks outside as Meera sobs about her cat, who slipped out the door when she was lugging groceries inside, how the neighbor’s unleashed, unfenced dog attacked him and how Frogger didn’t make it, how the vet will call her when his ashes are ready to be picked up.

“So I’m sitting here on my floor crying beside an empty cat carrier, and all I can think about is how fucking careless I am,” she says, her voice hitching. “I’m sorry, Benjen, calling you like some idiot but I just, no one is answering, and I’m staring at his little kitty food bowl down the hall, and I just, I just,” and he stops her with a  _Shh,_ unlocks his car and sits in the driver’s seat leaning back against the headrest, and her next words make him close his eyes and sigh. “I killed him, Benjen. I’ve had that cat for eight years, and he’s gone because of me.”

“It was an accident, Meera, they happen every day, you’re not at fault. If anything that cocksucker neighbor of yours needs to fence in his yard,” he says. “When I was a kid, not even ten, I gave the family dog a chicken bone, not knowing all that stuff about them breaking up in the dog’s stomach or throat or gut. My father ripped me a new one, and it took me years, _years_ not to feel guilt for putting her life in danger. It was an accident. I don’t want you feeling guilty for as long as I did. Seriously, it’s _not_ your fault.”

“Thank you,” she mumbles. She sounds rumpled, tangled, like over-stretched elastic discarded in a heap in a corner somewhere.

“Don’t mention it,” he says, starting his car, and he smiles when he hears the _thock_ of cork being popped. “Having some wine?”

“Drowning my sorrows,” she sighs, voice hitching, the faintest whine in the back of her throat as another sob threatens to spill out. “Where are you? You should have a drink with me so I’m not the pathetic woman crying _and_ drinking alone.”

He tells he’ll join her when he gets home and he is true to his word, and he pours himself a glass of red to drink with her white as he sits on his porch. They talk for the rest of the night, about Frogger and how much of a landmark adoption it was because she finally had put down roots long enough for a pet. She tells him her father Howland is an architectural engineer and he has taken her and her brother Jojen all over the states and to a handful of countries ever since her mother died when she was eight. How the second she got accepted to the University of Portland and found a little apartment she marched down to the cat shelter and adopted Frogger.

She’s running herself a bath when he tells her how the only time he’s left the country was on his honeymoon, a week in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, a trip they paid for with credit cards that took him ten years to pay off. When she asks, the echoing watery sounds of bathing in the background as she talks on speakerphone, he tells her that he met El in college when she was in pre law, how it was a quick courtship. He thinks about Jon but saves it for another day, is grateful the wine and the warm water have loosened her tongue as she lets a tangent take the conversation in a different direction. Benjen closes his eyes and listens to her bathe, remembers the weight of her legs in his lap here on this same porch swing not so long ago.

“Never been married,” she says later, when they’re both in their beds and Benjen is half asleep with his last shift ahead of him before six days off. “But I did get proposed to my senior year. I was dating this guy down in Portland, Lonnel,” she says, laughing when he snorts. “I know, I know. He was sweet though, and I loved him, but I just couldn’t see myself ever getting married. I told him it wasn’t him and that I wanted to stay with him, but it was a ring or nothing with him. Got up off of his knee and walked off, and that was that.”

“Marriage isn’t for everyone, that’s for sure,” he says with a half-smile and a yawn.

“Would you ever get married again?” Her voice is a tumble and fade, tumble and fade, a green glass marble rolling down a hill. “I mean, if it’s okay my asking."

He chuckles, tired as he is at 1am. “I don’t think so,” he says with a smile, eyes sliding closed. “I’ve already gone that route, and it didn’t work out. I don’t need to keep retracing my steps.”

“I like that,” she murmurs. “You’re a neat guy, Benjen,” and coming from a woman like her it’s one hell of a compliment.

“You’re not so bad yourself, sweetheart,” he says, rolling onto his side to turn off the light.

“I’ll have them put that on my tombstone,” she says. “And Benjen? Thank you.” He tells her it’s his pleasure because that’s the truth of it.

After they hang up for the night he dreams of Meera Reed in a huge, sprawling bath the size of a swimming pool, watches her swim beneath islands of sweet smelling bubbles, lithe as a mermaid, as distant as a star.

 

**Benjen:** You busy right now?

**Meera:** Just finishing up work before summer break, thank the devil. What’s up?

**Benjen:** Nothing, stop bothering me, Jesus.

Meera laughs, rolling her eyes as she drops her phone in her purse before locking the doors and heading out to the parking lot, shakes the day out of her hair with a drag of her nails through the mop of curls. She wonders if Osha might want to get a happy hour martini down at Bistango, and she’s got her phone at the ready to send a text when it comes to life with another message from Benjen. She grins, swiping her screen to read it, stops in the middle of the parking lot at the bizarre text.

**Benjen:** Play with your hair like that again, it’s cute.

**Meera:** WTF?

She frowns, staring at the screen a moment before looking up and all around, wondering if Jojen or Bran are here messing with her head somehow, but the only other car here at the end of the day is a Chevy Suburban, and now she’s laughing when she recognizes the man leaning against it.

**Meera:** Sneaky fucker!

**Benjen:** Come here and try me.

“Benjen!” she shouts, trying to wrap her head around this sudden materialization. He is like a mirage, and she finds she’s nearly running to him.

“It really _is_ a boring drive, isn’t it,” he says with an exasperated, exaggerated sigh.

“That’s why I never drive it. What in the hell are you doing here?” she says with a shake of her head, trying in vain to bite back the huge grin that’s making her cheeks hurt.

She walks into his chest when he pushes off the SUV and takes a few strides towards her, and though they haven’t seen each other in two months it’s like stepping right back into that March evening.

“It’s so good to see you,” she says, gazing up at him from the ensconcement of his embrace.

He’s tall and well-built just like she remembers, just like she thinks about in the dark sometimes as she retraces his explorations of her. _And he smells the same,_ she thinks, _clean with the lightest touch of cologne,_ and she inhales happily as he grins down at her.

“Good to see you too. Cat was nice enough to schedule the surprise birthday party for Ned when I’m off work, so I figured it was a good idea to show up. And what’s a trip here without a visit to my favorite Spokanian?”

“Shut up,” she says with a shove of her shoulder into his chest, and he laughs. “Well this is perfect, because now I can pay you back,” she says with a smile she can feel in her heart and deep down in her belly.

“For what?” he says, his hands a slide down her back as they pull apart.

“The tour, the oysters, the martini, the _sex dinner,_ ” she says in a stage whisper as she walks backwards from him, taking the keys from her purse and he laughs, hands in his pockets as he follows her to her car, but then he pauses midstride, holds up a hand to beckon her stop as well.

“I forgot something, hang on,” he says, turning back to his SUV, pulling the keys from the pocket of his jacket.

“Bring your bag, or bags, or whatever, while you’re at it,” she calls out, and he turns to her as he opens the passenger side door, his eyebrows a lift.

“Oh yeah? I was just going to get a hotel downtown, Meera, you don’t have to put me up,” he says, and he rests a forearm against the car door’s edge, leaning against it as he looks her up and down. _Jesus, he’s sexy._

“I’m not telling you because I think I have to, I’m telling you to get your goddamn bags because I want you to,” and he shakes his head as he looks down at the asphalt.

“Of course, what was _I_ thinking,” he says, and now he’s leaving the front passenger door ajar, turning to open the back door and pull out a canvas duffel bag.

He grins as he slams the back door shut before leaning in to grab something off the front seat, and then he closes that door as well. Meera gasps when he walks towards her, the handles of his bag in one hand and a cat carrier in the other.

“What have you done,” she breathes, crouching down to look through the metal bars of the little door, and there is a persistent mewling coming from the depths of the carrier.

“I know it’s only been about a month, but the timing of the trip sort of forced my hand. You were so upset. I wanted to do something,” he says.

It’s a typical male reaction, to fix things instead of just hear a woman out, _But he did listen, all night in fact,_ _for hours_ , she thinks as she gazes up at him a moment before looking back inside the carrier.

“You- I mean, I can’t believe you. You’re incredible,” she says, sticking her fingers through the bars, and finally the little ball of fluff comes forward, a grey tabby with lemonade eyes and the most indignant little meow.

“I figured you could name her Toad,” he says. “You know, because of, uh,” he says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

She refrains from smiling, only just, because he is uncomfortable now with the gesture, even though she is over the moon with it. But the last thing he needs is to be laughed at, especially after a four hour drive with a kitten.

“Yeah, I know. Thank you, Benjen, seriously,” she says when she stands, and he inclines his head obediently when she gets up on the tiptoes of her wedge sandals, and if he’s expecting a kiss on the cheek he is mistaken, because Meera kisses him full on the mouth, a smile spreading at the reconnection, at the way he tastes like new and something familiar all in one, at his slow exhale as she cups his face in her hands. “Come on, let’s take Toad back to my place. I can at least fix you a drink while we order takeout. But _I’m_ buying.”

“I missed this,” he murmurs some time later, after martinis and samosas and chicken korma, after Toad fell asleep on a feather pillow on the window seat behind her bed.

His lips and his short beard are a tickle and a brush against her breast as he kisses his way around her. He’s that lithe big cat again, long legs a diagonal sprawl across her bed as she drives her fingers through his hair, and she thinks of lions' manes and cats' tongues when he devotes more acute attention to her breast. They’ve been lying here for almost half an hour as the sweat dries, as the breathing slows, as the muscles relax under the weight of so much pleasure.

“Me too,” she says, a sigh to the ceiling as his hand drifts southwards inch by inch, tease by tease by tease.

She’s an unstrung bow, limp-limbed and flushed and aglow from within, but he’s able to rouse her back up again when he kisses his way back to her mouth, when he pushes inside her and tells her how good she feels. It’s rain rolling down a windowpane, sweat on his brow, the dig of his fingers when he draws her leg up and over his shoulder, a kiss to her ankle when she gasps his name, a high whine that makes him fuck her harder until she comes.

“Oh god, Benjen, yes,” she says, and she is reminded of how much he likes her to say his name when he grunts _Say it again, Meera, say it again._

His second orgasm isn’t as intense as the first but it depletes him all the same, and he’s a drape of man across her chest, a slow rise and fall of his back as he breathes deeper and deeper until he’s dozing with his face pressed to the valley between her breasts. Meera huffs a smile as she runs her fingers through his hair, forehead to nape and down his back, only to start from the top again, and after the second or third hum and rumble of satisfied slumber she eases out from underneath him. He twists onto his back with an arm thrown above his head, face tipped towards her as she wraps her blue silk robe around her, head tilted to the side as she gazes at him.

“One of a kind Benjen,” she murmurs with a smile before turning and heading down to the bathroom to wash up, and as an afterthought she runs herself a tub with lavender oil and bubbles, pours herself a glass of wine as she waits for the hot water to fill.

She’s a delicious throb and pulse and hum from him, and by the time her bath is ready she is a noodle of a woman, as boneless as Benjen is on her bed. Meera washes herself from head to toe before she sinks down under the water, her knees barely rising up as she submerges herself in the overlong tub, exhaling bubbles through her nose until she’s out of breath and has to sit up.

“There she is,” Benjen says from the doorway with a throw blanket wrapped around his hips, and she swipes the water from her eyes before looking up. He smiles sleepily, rubbing the back of his head. “Fell asleep, didn’t I?” and he chuckles when she smiles and nods. “ _Now_ I feel old,” he says, and she rolls her eyes, waves him into the room.

“Come on, join me,” she says, grinning and sinking down so the water reaches her chin when he gives her an incredulous look. “Seriously, I mean it. The faucet’s on the side so you won’t even bang your back against it, and it’s an even bigger bath than the one in your Seattle _manse,_ ” she says with snobbish flair and elongated vowel, and he laughs.

“I don’t have a manse,” he says, but he’s walking into the long, skinny room all the same.

“Compared to this tiny house, you do. Come on, you’ve been on the road, you’ve been ridden hard and put away wet, and I am sure a nice hot bath is just what the doctor ordered.”

“I was the one who rode _you_. Twice, remember?” he mutters.

He drops the blanket to the vintage tile before climbing in with her, and there are several giggles and chuckles and squeaks of bare skin along the bottom of the tub as they adjust. Finally he’s sufficiently submerged, his bent knees on the outside while hers are two small knolls in the center of the bathwater. Benjen repositions her so her feet are on either side of his torso, and in this fashion they are, for the most part, both comfortable.

“See, isn’t this nice? So long as you don’t fall asleep again, you know how dangerous it is when people fall asleep in water. Hey!” she says when he lazily reaches for the washcloth draped over the side of the tub, dunks it in the water and throws it at her chest.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s nice,” he says.

It’s a pleasant sensation, the sight of his body moving as he takes the soap and halfheartedly lathers up his chest and his arms, washes his face and scoops handfuls of water up and over his bowed head, and Meera watches as the overhead light catches in the trickles of water that drip from his hair.  They’re mostly quiet, communicating with gestures and murmurs until a companionable silence descends, and she’s got the feel of his fingers sweeping idly up and down her leg to lull her into a drowse.

“Meera,” he says after several minutes, and she _Mmms_ by way of response, eyes closed as she leans her head back against the edge of the tub. “Remember when you asked me about meeting El, and I told you we met in college?” Her eyelids are heavy when she lifts them, and the hot water and the orgasms and the trail of his fingers on her warm skin are all snares she must sidestep on her way to alertness.

“Yeah?” He is watching his hand roam up her shin to her knee and back down underwater, but after a moment he looks up at her.

“I left out the part about Jon.” His son is the last person she wants to talk about while naked in a bathtub with him, but she nods anyways, feels the frown crease her forehead between the eyebrows. It’s a strange thing to bring up but he never says anything without reason, and she lifts her head from the tub to look at him squarely.

“So tell me, Benjen,” she says, dropping a hand in the water to find him, and she rests her palm on the top of his foot that’s resting next to her hip.

“He- I met El in college, yes, but she wasn’t the only person I met. I was 20 and she was 18. Quiet bookworm meets fiery pre-law girl,” he says, and she nods, listens as he describes falling for his pretty ex-wife, and she’s about to lose self-preserving interest when he drops the bomb on her. “But I guess I also fell for her son, Jon,” he says quietly, and when her attention snaps back into place and she stares at him, he nods.

“But, no, wait, you made a mistake there somewhere, Jon is _your_ son,” she says, feeling stupid when he chuckles and shakes his head. _A mother at 18,_ she thinks, and it’s scratching at an old scar just to think about it

“No, I didn’t,” he says.

She studies him in wide eyed wonder and disbelief as he tells her the first time El worked up the courage to introduce Benjen to her two year old son, a dark haired little boy with serious eyes that reminded him of his brother. He tells her how his heart broke for the tragedy of it all, a girl getting pregnant in high school and subsequently abandoned, how it knocked something lose inside him to fall for not just a woman but a child as well.

“Did you marry her for Jon’s sake or because you loved her?” Meera asks, and he smiles at her knee as he traces a circle around its cap.

“Both,” he says, and she smiles too, a faint thing as she watches him, and it’s hard not to sit up and run her fingers through his soap-scrubbed hair. “I adopted him after we got married and gave him my name. He’s _my_ son. Yeah, he knows,” he nods when she asks. “He’s always known, but no one else does. Just El, Jon, and me. And now you,” he says with a smile, and something goes off inside her then, a firework or a flare, a shooting star and a revelation.

“Why did you tell me that, in the bath?” she says after they drained the tub and dried off, after he’s changed into a pair of pajama pants and she’s in a tank top and underwear.

He’s spooned up behind her in her bed while Toad is a puff cloud of grey fur in front of her, and she’s running a finger down her little kitty nose, listening to her tractor rumble of a purr as she waits for him to answer her.

“Because I wanted to. Because I left it out all those weeks ago and it didn’t sit right. I’ve told you everything so far, whenever you’ve asked it.” M

eera smiles, bites her lip to hear him say such things. It’s as true and kind a thing as any friend has ever told her, and she feels lucky for it and for him. There is a swell, too, of the desire to share, the need to open up and let someone in.

“I had a miscarriage in college,” she whispers in the dark, and the expansion of his chest stops mid-breath at her words. Meera closes her eyes. “It was with that guy I told you about, the one who proposed.”

“Lonnel,” he says, and she huffs. Of course he remembers that name.

“Yes, Lonnel. He, he was so cut up about it, when it happened. I had just barely found out I was pregnant, and then a week later it—well, I’ll spare you the details.”

“I’m sorry, Meera,” he murmurs, kissing her shoulder, and she shakes her head with her cheek pressed to the pillow.

“That’s not even the half of it,” she whispers.

She takes a breath and then gives him a truth she has never given anyone in her entire life, save for Jojen, when she tells him that she was relieved. Finding out she was pregnant so young and unprepared was the most terrifying thing that had happened to her since her mother died, she tells him. “When nature took over and ran its course I cried so hard, Lonnel cried with me, thinking I was devastated. But I was crying because I was just so relieved,” she says. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to, you know,” she says, feels his whiskers in an up-down rub on her shoulder when he nods. “But I didn’t want to be a mother, and I think the universe knew that.”

“It’s absolutely fine to not want kids,” he says after a moment, lifts his head and hand so he can smooth her hair away from her neck, and he kisses her there. “You didn’t have to tell me this though, to make it, I don’t know, to even the playing field,” he says, and she says _No, no_ as she twists in his arms, careful not to wake the kitty, whose purrs have died down to the steady breath of sleep.

“That’s not it at all,” she says, skating a hand up his chest to his neck, using it to find his face in the darkness. She cups his cheek, aims for his mouth and finds its corner instead, and his lips move in a smile beneath the kiss. “I’ve always ever told you the truth too. I wanted to tell you, I wanted you to know, because,” she says, and here’s the kicker, because it’s a hunch but it’s also an assumption, one that will make her feel stupid if it’s an erroneous one. “Because I knew you wouldn’t judge me for it.”

Benjen tightens the arm he’s got draped over her, pulls her flush to him and sighs out a yawn before kissing her forehead, not quite the center of it but just above her eyebrow.

“I wouldn’t judge you for anything,” he says and she knows he means it, and soon they fall asleep together here in this bed of truths, Benjen and Meera and a cat named Toad.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/112714833973/a-kiss-just-for-fun-chapter-3-feels)

“Which one?” she asks.

Benjen looks up from the armchair in which he’s currently reading, takes off his glasses to better focus on the two books Meera is holding up from several feet away. Her face falls into a pout. “Oh come on, leave the glasses on, they’re adorable,” she says, and they grin at one another as she wiggles the two books in the air. He rests the novel he’s reading pages-down on his knee, squints as he reads the titles.

“Tough call,” he says of the choice between Henley and Keats, but in the end he sits forward, taps the hardcover collection of Keats poetry with the stem of his reading glasses, and Meera  _Oohs_  with a nod as she turns it over to look at the cover.

“That’s the one I really wanted, perfect,” she says, and she is a one shouldered shrug when he chuckles and shakes his head. “Whatever, second opinions are totally legit, even in bookstores,” and she points her finger at him and nods, repeats him when he tells her  _Especially in bookstores._

Benjen watches her walk away, a pair of black shorts paired with a second hand blazer she apparently bought for $5 at a thrift store two years ago, an outfit he watched her put together that morning. The tap of her bare foot as she dragged a few articles of clothing out of her suitcase; the mismatched bra and panties she stood in, unabashed even as he gazed at her from the bed where he drank coffee and tried to read.

The way she wiggles into shorts or jeans has become a familiar dance now that they are two days into her third stay with him here in Seattle, a good four months since that very first night. The way her hair bounces until it’s all over with a zip and button, how she rolls her eyes at him when she catches him staring are lovely little assaults to his senses. And sometimes, sometimes, there is the way he only needs to set down his book before she’s back in his bed, and he has the pleasure of undressing her, over before it began.

He shakes himself from the thoughts like Ghost shaking off the rain, returns his glasses to the bridge of his nose and dives back into  _Blackberry Wine,_  a book she bought for him and deposited into his lap, telling him he’ll love it, and he does. They have been here in The Elliott Bay Book Company for nearly two hours and neither of them seems much inclined to leave. His casual roaming, plucking and replacing of books was cut off early by her gift to him, while Meera is a wander, an ebb and flow to and fro across the high gloss wood floors. She always returns to his chair, however, asking his opinion on a book, reciting a joke she read in some humorist’s new best seller, and then his favorite antic, dropping  _Delta of Venus_  in his lap before walking away, a hot little glance over her shoulder pinning him in place.

The moment she disappeared amongst the shelves, Benjen swiftly stood and bought it.

“All right, I think I’ve exhausted myself,” she says when she comes back for what seems to be the last time, a small collection of books straining the handles of the plastic bag she’s got over her wrist, pushing the cuff of her blazer up her forearm.

“Here, let me,” he says as he stands, glancing at his page number to mentally mark it for later.

He drops _Blackberry Wine_ in with _Delta of Venus_ into his own bag, and as he takes hers, fingers a curl and drag against the fair skin of her wrist, Meera reaches up and removes the reading glasses from his face, a gentle pull that puts the world back into focus after he blinks.

“One good turn deserves another,” she says with a smile, slipping the glasses into the outermost zipper on her purse. “You’re going to break these if you keep them in your jeans pocket, silly man. Anyways,” she says with a satisfied sigh, giving the bookstore a final glance before he pushes open the door, letting her step out ahead of him. “Where should we go now?”

He is smiling, can still feel the slide of his glasses across his temples as the brightness of sunlight through cloud cover envelops them, and he slings an arm over her shoulders, dragging her against his side as they walk back to his car. “Well, what do you feel like doing? The world is your oyster, not that we haven’t already eaten them,” and she laughs, wrapping her arm around the small of his back, her fingers a hook through the empty belt loop at his hip.  

They have long since dropped any pretense for their visits which suits him just fine; there are no more surprise parties for his brother to use as reasons to show up on Meera’s doorstep. She was just as eager to fling away the excuses late last month, calling him a couple of weeks after the few days he spent with her in Spokane.  _Let’s hang out,_  she told him, and promptly booked a flight he insisted he pitch in for after he told her the next six day span he had off.

“My oyster, huh? I like the sound of that,” she says with a luxurious sigh, tapping her finger on her cheek as he unlocks the passenger door for her, and he holds it open as she hops up onto the seat, leans over to take back books. “But that’s half the problem, if you have the whole world,” she says when he gets behind the wheel. He pulls a U-turn or flips a bitch as Meera calls it and they head back to his neighborhood. She rests her head back against the seat and tips her face to look at him, and he gives her an easy glance as he switches lanes. “If you can have it  _all,_  how do you choose?”

“You ask for help,” he says, laughing when she presses the back of one hand to her forehead, the palm of the other to her chest.

She drowns out Stevie Wonder with the moans and whimpers of a distressed damsel on a fainting couch. “Oh Benjen, please,  _please,_  wherever is a woman to go? Whatever shall she do?” and she does a pretty damn good impression of a swooning woman, considering she’s already sitting down.

“She should hush her mouth and go with the flow,” he says, and she gasps with mock indignation, but he holds up his hand against the oncoming attack as he turns a corner. “I’m taking you to a great dive bar with fish and chips and huge beers. We’ll play pool and I’m sure you’ll kick my ass and that will make you _so_   _happy,_ ” he says with a touch of her dramatic flair, grins when she tells him that's probably true.

Luck is on his side, however, when they finally settle in with their beer at The Sloop, and Meera confesses she has to be wasted before she’s any good at pool, though she racks them just fine after insisting he be the one to break. Benjen stretches out over the table and sets up his shot, stills completely, ceases even to breathe before he slides the cue forward, and as he straightens there is the satisfying sight and sound of the billiard balls clicking and colliding.

“And here I thought you’d be good at everything you put your mind to,” he says, handing her the cue. “You’re stripes, by the way.”

“Yeah, yeah, big shot, I can see which ball you sunk, I’m not  _that_  bad,” she says, circling the table as she tries to figure out what shot to attempt, and she slaps a glare on him when he opens his mouth to make a suggestion. Benjen lifts his eyebrows and nods, wiping his hand over his mouth as if to smear away the words. It hides his grin as well.

They are halfway through their game when she gives up trying to beat him at his own game, and instead takes up the rather more interesting challenge of making him miss his shots. It’s a good twenty minutes of pretending to drop things so she can bend over to pick them up, of resting her elbows on the edge of the pool table to squeeze her breasts together, of walking by and making the same sounds she made late last night with her back to his chest and their hands joined between her thighs.

“You little shit _,_ ” he says when his vision fills with the sight of her lips parting and a finger sliding into her mouth, and as a result he sinks the eight ball and the cue ball right after it.

He straightens with a  _Goddammit,_  looking at her with feigned exasperation as he plants his cue stick to the floor and leans on it. As she walks past him to drink her beer he snags her by the hip, and she is all laughter and long neck when he pulls her in against him.

“You deserved it, show off,” she says before he kisses her, the hand on her hip sliding up her side before he lifts it to hold her close by the back of her neck, and he’s grinning to taste the laugh that thins and ribbons into a giggle deep down in her throat. She’s smiles and cat purrs, bright gazes and white teeth, the sweet sting of sensation like the slap of a hand to bare skin.

“See, you’re good at _that_ ,” he murmurs in time before she kisses him back, mirroring his posture with her hand at the nape of his neck, fingers in his hair where he so thoroughly enjoys her touch.

“I know I am,” she says.

It’s hard to quit kissing her, even as they grin and goad each other. He chucks their cue stick on the pool table in the middle of the ruined game and wraps his other arm around her, feels his t-shirt tighten across his chest when she fists a handful of it above his heart. If it’s uncanny that he can’t seem to keep his hands off of her in bars it’s even worse that they can’t seem to go uninterrupted, because suddenly a hand claps him hard on the shoulder, knocks him and Meera loose with a stagger.

“Is this handsy bastard bothering you, ma’am?” booms a voice from behind him, and he half twists away from Meera to see not only Tormund but Grenn, Pyp and Val as well, and they are four cracked-wide grins, the latter two standing shoulder to shoulder with their arms folded across their chests.

He should have known better, choosing station 21’s favorite watering hole to display his private life.

 

“This handsy bastard is making my day,” Meera says from the lovely tuck and burrow under Benjen’s arm and against his side, and the big red-haired man throws his head back and laughs.

He says  _Well played,_ introduces himself as Tormund and she meets Grenn, Pyp and finally Val, whose pretty eyes sparkle with something Meera can almost, almost put her finger on, though it escapes her in the end. They’re all perfectly friendly despite the transparent grins she keeps getting from Grenn and Pyp as Benjen’s three male coworkers convince him to play another round of pool, though he flicks his gaze her way to gauge her reaction. She nods once, nearly imperceptible, not bothered in the slightest to see him with his friends, and when Val carries over a giant mug of beer and sits down, she also has the pleasure of the other woman’s company.

Val mentions her work at the firehouse, that she’s an EMT paying her dues before bumping over to positionof firefighter, that while most people get overwhelmed with the intensity she finds she can handle it, almost likes it some days. To her credit she seems genuinely interested in Meera’s detailing of work as a librarian, though they could not be farther from one another on the spectrum of exciting jobs. She tells her about Spokane Community College, how it’s a tiny library but is home to her, and Val nods with a smile.

“So you live in Spokane. I think I already knew that. It’s kind of a far drive for a few weekend visits."

Meera ducks her head to hide a smile, lets her hair fall in her face before looking back up.  _He’s talked about us, they know we’re visiting each other,_  and it’s like being transported back to high school and the carousel ride of thoughts like  _He likes me, he likes me_ even though she  _knows_  they like each other.  _You can’t have fun if you don’t like each other._ It is still a sweet thought, a tingle in her fingertips and a smile she can’t seem to get rid of.

“That’s why I fly,” Meera says, allowing her gaze to slide his way, and Benjen is laughing with his beer lifted halfway to his mouth, head dropping in a shake at some crass joke Tormund must have said. “And the visits are worth the cost.”

“Well, considering the spring that’s been in his step lately, I’d say well worth it to  _him_ ,” Val says, turning her head to follow Meera’s gaze.

The added attention of another woman is enough to make all four men look up. Tormund clears his throat and chases his dirty joke with a swig of beer and a grin. Pyp and Grenn are unable to tamp down their expressions of youthful eagerness, the way that every man in his twenties hopes a woman’s attention means he’s going to get laid. Benjen is caught mid-laugh, ease and confidence and that amused look in his eyes that he so often sends her way, all those things she so thoroughly enjoys, and they’re still looking at each other when Val says her name.

“Mm?” she says, pulling her attention off of him, the sweep of a hand through a gauzy spider web, and she covers it all with a deep swallow of Martime dark ale that she’s drinking.

“So, you two,” Val says, trailing off a minute as she drinks her beer, and then she grins, and there’s that sparkly flicker of mischief, of  _something_  in her pale eyes. “You have to tell me, is it true, about being with an older guy?”

Meera grins.

“Here, give me your hand,” she says, sitting up straight on her stool by the rear brick wall, and she holds out her hand, palm side up to receive Val’s in the same fashion. The blonde furrows her brow in bemusement, though she is smiling just the same, and it does not escape Meera’s attention that her new friend is not the only one watching and listening.

“Some woman thing is going on,” mutters Grenn, and Meera lifts her eyes to Val and the two of them grin at each other.

“This is how guys our age are,” she says, and with her thumb and forefinger she lightly flicks Val’s hand in the dead center of her palm. Val laughs, head tossed back, ponytail a sway behind her.

“Believe me, I get it,” she says. “Wham bam and not much more. Go on, show me Ben now,” Val says, sitting up straighter and leaning over the little wall-mounted wooden table at which they’re seated.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, this is biased. She’s clearly biased if she’s sleeping with Benjen,” Pyp says, but if he’s truly irritated or just kidding Meera doesn’t know, because she refuses to take her eyes off of Val’s.

“And this is how certain men of a certain age are."

She places the tip of her forefinger over Val’s pulse on her wrist, lets it rest there a moment before she slides it, achingly slow over the heel of her palm and down. The applied pressure mounts until it’s a firm push where her fate line and head line meet in the center, and then she eases off until it’s a tease of a touch down the length of Val’s middle finger, until only their fingertips touch. Meera presses her nail into the pad of her finger before taking the touch away completely.

"At least, how Benjens of a certain age are."

Val lets out a wavering sigh. “Oh,” she says, staring down at her hand even when Meera releases her and sits back. “Oh, I see.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tormund mutters, turning away to find his beer when Meera finally dares to look up the other three are staring.

Pyp and Grenn’s mouths hang open, and when they both look at Val, Meera follows suit; the blonde is ghosting Meera’s trailing touch with her fingers.

“You flatter me, Ms. Reed,” Benjen says, and she looks back at him, can’t help but bite her lip.

His expression is enigmatic at best, a deep, heady thing that makes her think of dark red wine, of sinking her teeth into meat, of being devoured herself. He’s leaning against his pool cue again, both hands cupped over its tip as he rests his chin on his knuckles.

“Hey, so Ben,” Val says, interrupting the moment, the slice of scissors on a swathe of silk pulled taut between them. Everyone looks her way. “Mance is your age. He’s single, right?”

It’s another couple of hours until they’re alone again, after another round of beer and pool and delicious fish and chips, after a drive back to his place where he teased her incessantly, running a fingertip down her palm until she smacked his upper arm, making him laugh the last two blocks home.

“I feel like an oil slick after all that greasy food,” she says, setting down her bag of books on his desk by the door before turning to walk backwards away from him. “Mind if I take a dunk in your tub?” He smiles at her, shutting and locking the door behind them.

“Not at all. It’s nice to hear you splash around in there,” he says.

She stops as he approaches her, closes her eyes as he brushes past her, fingers four strokes across her belly before he passes. He is peace and quiet and the eye of a storm, the silent padding of a sleepy jungle cat, all these things that draw her and coax her and pull, pull, pull. She turns on the heel of her cherry red ballet flat to follow his retreat with her gaze before drifting towards the bathroom off the hall.

She’s deliciously clean and dry in her blue silk robe when she finds him later, has the scent of sesame oil soaking into her skin when she happens upon him in his little den, a room of well-worn edges and lack of pretense. He lounges in the corner of the sofa with his feet crossed at the ankle on the ottoman, reading a small book with his glasses on. He has never looked furthest from a firefighter as he does now. Meera realizes he must be fearless though, prodding around a woman’s purse for his glasses, but she supposes it’s hard to keep a man like him from his books.

“I poured you wine,” he says when she finally crosses the threshold, smiles and raises his eyes over the frames of his glasses, tips his head towards the end table where two glasses stand in the wash of lamplight.

He must have showered in his own bathroom while she bathed, splashing around himself, because his hair is damp and he’s in nothing but a pair of flannel pants. He looks warm here in this room, looks the way some people describe home, all fuzzed out corners and softly lit globes of light. It makes her smile, gives her an idea that heats her more than the bath did, that scrubs her heart fresh and clean and makes it ready to beat.

“Perfect, thank you,” she says, “I’ll be right back,” and she sprints down the hall on her tiptoes to the bag of books on his desk before coming back to sit beside him on the couch. She drops Keats in his lap and reaches over him for her glass of wine, settles in against his side and sighs happily when he drapes an arm over her shoulders.

“Hmm? What’s this,” he says, leaning to the side to set his book on the end table face side down, and she sips her wine as he sifts through the pages with the shadow of a smile on his face.

“Read to me,” she says, taking another long swallow of wine before handing him her glass, and he lifts his eyebrows as he sips, watching her over the rim. “Please?”

“Yeah?”

He deepens his slouch when she asks him to read his favorite Keats poem, and Meera’s eyes close when she stretches her legs out on the sofa, has his naked chest to rest her cheek on. Benjen takes his time thumbing through the pages, resting the book on his thigh so he can find what he wants one handed.

“To Hope,” he recites after the clearing of his throat, after a deep pull of wine from his glass, and she inhales deeply when he starts to read, as if trying to pull into her lungs his words and the wine that paints them.

His voice is smooth and deep out in the open, is thunder and rain rumbling through his chest into her ear, and soon she abandons her glass to the floor by the foot of the sofa to better listen. They are lilting words, heavy and sweet at once, and he is emphatic as he reads words like _careless heart_ and _morbid fancy,_ and when he reads _to sigh out sonnets_ _to the midnight air_ Meera realizes her fingers have curled into her palm.

Somewhere in the midst of all these pretty words, in the tilt of his head as he angles the book to the side, elbow resting on the arm of the sofa, he removes her hair clip, lets her dry hair tumble down. There is a breath caught somewhere in her body, maybe her toes, maybe in the thorns and wild bramble of her heart, when the touch of his fingers along her hairline mingles with the touch of his recitation in her thoughts and against her soul. Soon he’s running his fingers through her hair down to her shoulder, a languid sort of up and down along the silk of her robe, and she realizes he’s as lost in the words and the textures as she is. Meera feels drunk. It’s either his voice or the poetry or the drift of his hand down to her forearm, the lost soul wander of his thumb under the hem of her sleeve before he’s back up to her shoulder and in her hair.

She hopes he never stops reading, hopes he will say things like _From thy bright eyes unusual brightness shed_ and _sparkling majesty_ to her forever, that whatever spell is being woven will never come undone. The pressure of his touch increases when she slides her hand across his ribs in an embrace and a plea for more poetry, and she rests her hand flat over his sternum, seeking any other way to feel the words and their vibration, the heat of him and the steady way he speaks.

“So, when dark thoughts my boding spirit shroud, Sweet Hope, celestial influence round me shed, Waving thy silver pinions o'er my head,” he says, voice a slight grate after speaking so long without stopping, and she feels the sudden lack of verse profoundly.

The last words are hushed and swooping and low, strung together like lights in a dark tree, and she hears the book shut before he sets it and his glasses on the table, hears him sigh to have the poem end. She is on her side, has the view of his long legs instead of his face, and she turns, slides the hand on his chest down to the sofa on the other side of him, twists so that she’s sitting beside him but facing him now. Benjen’s head is sagged back against the couch, heavy from so much loveliness and from the weight of expressing it, though he smiles when their eyes meet. His hand lifts, touches her face, gets lost in her hair and along her cheekbone until both his gaze and his fingers drop to her mouth. She wants to suck on them like blackberries. She thinks maybe she wants to consume him.

“Benjen,” she says, and it’s a slow drag, a net through water when he lifts his eyes back to hers.

She rests her hand against his cheek, the scruff of it a rub on her palm, and at the touch his eyelids flicker, his eyes nearly roll back before he focuses on her. Benjen sighs.

“Meera,” he says, an invitation somewhere past simple pleasure, somewhere she has never been before, somewhere she never knew she wanted to be until this exact moment.

 

He’s got the slip of her robe in his hands when she shifts, rises to her knees to slide perfectly into place here on his lap, and the rustle of silk is loud in this otherwise silent room. He’s seen her in that robe a dozen times already, has had the good fortune to push it from her shoulders, but Benjen’s heart pounds now at the merest thought of it. The forward sway of her hair casts half her face in shadow and he lifts his hands to drag away the tousle to better see her. Meera’s head tilts back under his touch, throat lengthening as she arches back and lets her eyes close, and he has half a mind to kiss her skin but the sight is too lovely. It fills him up as a kiss would and so he drags his hands through her hair to the back of her skull, lets his fingers feather out as they come down her throat to her shoulders. He will paint her with his skin, leave behind his fingerprints and the things he can’t name just yet.

When she rights her head and looks back down at him he sucks in a breath, lets it out as she brushes his lower lip with her thumb, cards her fingers through his hair, runs the touch down his jaw. His gaze lowers to where he is brushing back her robe. Her skin is the milk white of her bathwater, is just as sweet when he finally sits up to kiss what he can as he pulls the robe down. She sighs when it falls in a puddle of silk to the floor, and when he lowers his feet from the ottoman they rest upon it, a pool of midnight blue and cherry blossoms.

Meera brings herself closer to him with the widening spread of her thighs and the brush of her bare breasts to his chest, sinks down against him until her hips are snug against his. When she bows over him, when he has the curve of her back beneath the hungry press of his hand Benjen finally has her open mouth on his. His hands want her body but there’s something precious here, and he cups her face to hold her to him, to make sure he has the time to say what poetry cannot, to let his tongue shape different words and sentiments against hers.

Her hands are busy when she rises up onto her knees, though even as she divests him of his pants she undulates enough to keep the kiss alive, back an arch and then a curve until he’s as naked as she is. Benjen has the intoxicating feeling of scooping her down towards him, his arms around her as he pulls her in so he can feel on his skin how wet she is. _Those hands of hers_ he thinks with a groan when she wraps them around him, takes him for hers with a final lift and settle of her hips, possesses him with a long, shuddering slide into place.

“Oh God,” he says, ragged and torn at the sound of her whimper, at the way she straightens her spine with the inclusion of him inside her, and for a fleeting moment he thinks he could come right this minute.

Meera is all sighs when she kisses him again and when she moves, moves, moves. She has his face in her hands now, and with his hands gripping the backs of her thighs he helps her in the rise and fall, the rise and fall, lets her push him back against the couch. There is a devastating rock of her hips that nearly kills him, and now the room is not so silent anymore, not with the staccato of panting breath, with hums that roll like tides into moans and words that die before they’re anything more than sounds.

“Benjen,” she says, in that husky deep-water voice of hers when they’re like this, but now it sounds like a question he so desperately wants to answer, a riddle he thinks he knows even though he’s never heard it before in his life.

“Yes,” he says between the roll of her hips and the rising of his own. "Yes,” he says when she winds her arms around his neck and kisses him, and he is ensnared, swallowed up by her when he lifts his hips and thrusts into her, when she squeezes her legs, her knees a dig into his sides.  

He says her name again and again, closes a fist into her hair to pull her head back, and she gasps and moans when he kisses her throat, presses his teeth into her, palms her breast in his hand. He thinks fleetingly of knotted twine being teased apart when the climax bleeds in from the edges, foothills to a peak he thinks she can feel through him by the way she pants into his mouth, and he thinks _Yes, give it up, give it up and I’ll take it all_ when she comes and pulses around him.

“Oh God, Benjen. Please, I, _oh_ ,” she says as her head sags back, her nails a dig and rake across his upper back, making him arch up and away from the couch with a hiss. She squeezes her legs again, wraps her arms around him again and presses her forehead against his neck. “Benjen?”

“Yes, Meera,” he says, answering her, solving it at last, and it is a blinding moment of clarity and where they are right here and now until he comes and all thoughts fly from his head.

His hands leave her thigh and her hair so he can have her in his arms, can have the tight press of her against his trunk, and she tells him _Oh God, yes_ when he pushes up inside her one final time.

They fall asleep later that evening in their typical tangle, Benjen a spoon of long torso and legs behind her tiny frame, but for the first time when he wakes it is with her head on his chest. She has one arm tucked like a wing between them and the other draped across him with her fingers tucked between his shoulder and the pillow. His arms are a tight hold around her, as if they slept through a storm that threatened to tug her away, and he smiles with his eyes still closed when she asks how he slept.

“Like I haven’t for a long, long time,” he says, and her fingers move, lifting to the hairline at the back of his neck, and it brings everything back. The swell and sway. Hot kisses and indefinable touch. Answers he never thought he’d know again. “How about you?”

“I dreamed about you,” she says simply before breathing in and exhaling a sigh, and he hears the smile in her voice when next she speaks. “I dreamed about you, and it was wonderful.”

“I dreamed of you a long time ago,” he says. “You were swimming like a mermaid in scented water.”

The room is the faded out gray of an early hour, far too early for either of them judging by their mumbling voices and the yawn he can’t quite stifle.

“I like that dream,” she says with a rich sigh and the tip of her face into the hair on his chest.

He loosens his hold on her for a moment to sweep her hair away from his mouth and back beneath his chin, to let his palm run down the dip of her waist and up her hip before sliding back into place.

“So did I,” he says.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/113004453618/a-kiss-just-for-fun-chapter-4-feels)

They are ideal conditions for reading away the afternoon. Open windows pull and throw in breezes from her neighborhood, rich with the scent of pine, weighted down with that singular smell of sunshine, touched with warmth and splintered through with the sound of children playing down the street. Toad is by her feet, chasing the lacework shadows that dance on the bedspread from the sift and drift of the curtains that billow behind her, and her occasional bleats and mewls are that teasing tickle of sound that can help a girl lose herself in a book. Meera has her afternoon tea steaming on the nightstand to her right, can just barely smell the orange peel and vanilla. It’s her ideal Saturday with a book on her lap and hours to fill with words and visions and imagination, to saturate with poetry and verse and rhyme and reason, but her head is empty. Empty, save for him.

She runs her hands across the page of poetry, and even though it’s not  _that_  poem, it’s still Keats, and she finds it’s impossible, concentrating. The tap of his reading glasses against the cover when she asked him to choose, the roll of his voice under her ear as he read to her, the look they shared after he set the book down.  _This damned book,_  she says, and she feels like Toad, tracing with her fingers the lacey shadows and dapples of sun across the page, unable to focus, unable to see words as they swim and dart and refuse to listen to order.

It’s been a little over a week since she got back from Seattle, and nearly every day has been spent in such a stupor, such languid confusion and bewilderment. Work is a haze, and all her free time has been spent at home where she moves around like a marble in an empty mint tin, the last match in its box. There was something that night, something she’s scared to put a finger on, let alone name. The way he moved, the way he held her, touched her face, the way she clung to him. It felt like cherishment and worship, it felt like prayer though she hasn’t done that since before her mother died. It was- it was-  _Benjen? Yes, Meera._ It was that,  _just that_ , a yes, a question and an answer.  _Or was it? Did I imagine it?_ She bites her lip and slaps the book shut, making Toad leap like a jumping bean and land with four paws outstretched, head on a swivel, lemonade eyes wild.

“You and me both, fuzzy,” she says with a sigh, setting the book on her nightstand beside her tea, and she scoots down and lies on her side, arms shoved under her pillow, and she stares at the book of poetry.

It’s a warm day but her tea runs cold, the curls of steam dying slowly but surely, and it scares her because it makes her wonder, and she is about to text him like she has almost texted him half a hundred times, but there is a knock on her door. Her heart skips just as Toad jumps again, this time bolting out of the room, and the humor of it dissolves some of the lesser feelings bunching up in her heart.

 _Afraid, afraid, afraid_ , she hears with each footfall on her way to the door, and she is ready to turn away solicitors or Jehovah’s Witnesses with a piece of her mind, but when she yanks open her front door, sticky from the humidity, it’s sardonic smiles and arched eyebrows poured into the shape of her friend Osha.

“All right, Grey Gardens, get dressed,” she says with a downward glance.

Meera follows suit, wincing as she does so. It’s tea-dyed linen pajama pants and a tank top with two pantyhose-style rips on the torso, it’s bare feet with a bruise on one toe from walking without looking, from having her thoughts in Seattle instead of here, for living in his bed instead of the present. She resists the urge to close her eyes.  _His hands through my hair, holding me still, his, oh, his everything._

“What for?” she says with a sigh, pushing the door further open and turning on her heel.

Osha is two creaks on the floorboard as she steps in and closes the door behind her.

“What for? Who cares, what for? Let’s go be ladies who lunch, let’s go shopping, who gives a shit. You need to get out of the house. Jojen’s wants to come too,” she says.

Meera turns around and sits in her little front room, her back to the ceiling high shelves of books behind her couch. Osha folds her arms across her chest before she  _whumps_  onto the sofa cushion beside her.

“Jojen is a lady who lunches? Gee, you kiss a few boys,” Meera starts, and Osha laughs, lazily slapping her bare arm with the back of her wrist.

“You know what I mean. He’s way more attentive to your moods than you realize, and he’s the one who suggested it. He just wasn’t sure what kind of lovesick den of iniquity he’d be waltzing into here, so he sent me.”

Meera looks at her friend; her dark hair is bleached and dyed green on the ends, bringing the sea out of her eyes, and there in the clever wash of them she sees concern. She does her best to roll her eyes at the worry.

“I’m not lovesick,” she tries, but even she has to wonder at the truth of her words.

She can still feel the page of poetry beneath her fingers, can still feel the rub of his skin, the hairs on his chest and his forearms, and she runs her thumbs over the pads of her fingertips.  _Love, huh?_ “All right, fine, I’ll get dressed.”

Forty minutes later they take her old Saab since Osha’s dirty little Nissan pickup is a tight squeeze for three adults and because no one wants to straddle the stick shift.

“So,” Osha says as they idle at a red light, as she sweeps her eyes over Meera once more. “What’s different, this time? Usually you come back from Seattle like you’ve had nothing but shots of espresso, all you want to do is chatter about the coast and about Benjen, and now, radio silence. What changed?”

_Everything. Nothing. Everything._

“It- we- okay, so the night before I had to come home, we um, we had sex,” and Meera closes her eyes behind her sunglasses, shakes her head at what she knows is coming. Osha gasps.

“No! Not  _sex,_  Meera. What are you going to tell your father? You’ll be  _ruined_ ,I don’t care how big the dowry poor Howland has to heap on the sad sucker who marries the sullied woman.”

She’s laughing, watching her chipped nail polish wink and blink in the sun as she stretches her arm out the open car window. Meera rolls her eyes with a smile.

“Are you finished?”

The light changes as if on cue and Meera drives them through the intersection, a glance in the rearview showing a peek of the bandana tied up in her hair.  _He said he likes my hair like this,_  she thinks, wondering if that’s why she did up this way.  _You’re turning into an idiot._

“Yeah, I’m finished,” Osha says, her laughter dying on an amused sigh. “Okay, tell me about the mind blowing fucking.”

“It- that’s just it. It wasn’t that. I mean yeah, it was mind blowing, but it wasn’t fucking. And believe me, we’ve done  _that_  plenty,” she says, and it’s true. No surface, no room, no position has been safe.  _I think you woke me up,_  he told her once.  _I think you woke me up, and it’s been so long I don’t think I can ever go back to sleep._  She shivers.

“Oh, so it’s  _love_  making now,” she says with a spike of approval in her voice, a shot of whiskey in a cup of coffee.

“Osha,” she says with a quick sidelong glare as she pulls into the parking lot of Jojen’s apartment building. “Nobody said anything about love.”

“Okay, describe it, before your poor brother gets in and has to clap his hands over his ears,” her friend says, tipping her head towards her with a droll look on her face. “And don’t leave anything out,” she whispers with raised eyebrows.

Meera doesn’t. She parks the car a few units down from Jojen’s place, tells her about the entire day. She tells her about books and pool and meeting his friends, about talking with Val and the hot way he looked at her. She tells her about poetry and wine, about the way he looked at her, how her name sounded when it slipped from his mouth, like smoke leaves a blown out candle. She pauses a moment, and then she sighs, tells her how she crawled on top of him, the way his hands made her skin burn and cool in one, how her heart throbbed as much as he did. And finally she tells how there was a physical ache, deep inside where she’s never felt a thing before, tucked away inside a locked up little trinket no one has ever bothered to pick up and examine before. Maybe not even her.

They are both silent a few moments, gazing at the weather-proofed wooden fence that lines the apartment complex’s property, both too lost in thought to hear footsteps, and when her brother raps his knuckles on the top of the car they both scream.

“Dammit, Jojen,” Osha snaps as she shakes herself out of it, and her brother is his typical sleepy-rumple chuckle when he opens the rear door and gets in, shutting the door behind him.

“Hello to you too,” he says, pressing a warm-fingered grip onto Meera’s shoulder. “How’s tricks, sis?”

“Oh you don’t want to know,” Osha says as Meera backs the car out of the parking spot and pulls out of the lot. “At least not any of the good parts.”

They spend an hour or so in a few thrift stores downtown, avoiding the trussed up second hand places with lots of factory-churned junk like feather boas and plucky little newsboy caps. Jojen spends most of his time trying to find a pocket watch and fob for Bran’s birthday, though after he digs the more PG-13 details from his sister, he lingers by her side as she tries on scarves.

“So, how is that not love, again? The little locket in there,” he says, tapping the middle of her back with a slender forefinger. “All that yearning. How is that not love?”

Meera glances around, sees Osha flirting with the guy behind the counter, turns away from the mirror to face her brother.

“Because how can you love someone if you’re not sure he loves you back? Isn’t that just some girlish crush?” and there is the truth of it, the fear and the insecurity, the worry that he’s lying back and going with the flow while she’s the younger woman with pie in the sky ideas. “It’s supposed to be fun, you know. Just having  _fun._ And then I make him read me Keats like we’re lovers sitting on some misty moor somewhere, and suddenly I’m in love?” There are tears in her eyes, and they make her angry.

“Oh wow,” Jojen murmurs, tipping his head into hers, squinting as he focuses and brushes a tear from her lower eyelid. “Hey, now. Who’s to say it’s ‘suddenly,’ huh? You’ve been seeing each other for months. Plus, who  _couldn’t_  fall in love with you? Well, at least when you’re not wearing this,” he says, gingerly taking the scarf from around her neck, and Meera laughs.

“Come on, let’s get something to eat,” he says, pulling her in with an arm over the shoulders in a familiar way that makes her think of Benjen. 

 _Yes, Meera,_  she thinks, her lower lip between her teeth as she’s steered towards the door.  _Oh God, yes,_  she remembers, and closes her eyes against the sunlight out on the sidewalk.

 

Benjen has never been one to worry about things over which he has no control, but he’d be lying if he tried telling himself her silence does not eat at him. He sent her the gift three days ago and knows she’s received it by now, but each time he checks his texts it’s the same.

**Meera:**

It was a bold move after such a brief time of knowing one another, but then, time has little to do with anything, in the long run. Ned proposed to Cat after only eight months together, Jon moved in with Ygritte after four months and his niece is marrying a man she’s only known for over a year.  _It should matter less the older you get anyways,_  he thinks, looking at his phone once more before slipping it in his pocket, turning to his dresser to pull out the change of clothes he’ll need for the shift that starts in an hour. It’s a short stack of jeans, underwear and a t-shirt, it’s a mindless task he performs ten times a month, but the sight of his station 21 t-shirt halts him in his tracks. The shirt she wore after the first time they slept together, after she shoved him onto his back and climbed up his bed and up his body. He will probably never wear it again, though he’ll be damned if he ever throws it out, regardless of her reaction to what he sent her.

He is nearly out the door, hand on the knob when someone knocks on it, startling a  _Jesus Christ_  out of him, and he freezes when he recognizes the low laugh from the other side. It’s almost funny, how slowly he opens the door, peering through it like he fears the grim reaper or worse, a door salesman. But there she is in her glory, slouchy jeans and a baseball jersey, the weekend warrior uniform he remembers from years ago; pretty El, about as relevant to him now as a polaroid photo at the bottom of a desk drawer.

“Hey. What’re you doing here?” he asks.

Her eyebrows lift at the rude hello, but then drift down to the duffel bag in his hand.

“Hello yourself, mister,” she says, dropping her hands into her pockets, shoulders lifting up around her dark hair.

He thinks of a fistful of curls and smiles despite himself. “I can tell I caught you before work, but can I come in for a minute?” The idea of his ex-wife stepping foot in the home they once shared used to be disturbing, but it’s been a long, long time since he swept out her cobwebs and shadows, and so he glances at the clock above his desk and nods.

“Yeah, sure, for a minute,” he says, not quite mistrustful but not quite full of sunshine either, and he tosses the duffel bag to the floor beside the threshold after she walks in and closes the door behind her. “What’s up, El? You haven’t been here in- we haven’t spoken in a year. Maybe even longer,” he adds, now that he thinks about it.

The last time she was here Jon was holed up in his bedroom ignoring them both, infuriated and full of teenage resentment. Weighted silences and boxes of her stuff filled the front room where she used to drum pencils on her thigh while doing the crossword. It floors him, remembering that; mostly because he hasn’t thought about it in years, mostly because he likes the house without her ghosts. He smiles, walking past her to sit on the couch, rubs the back of his head as he thinks of the silken splash of a woman in a bathtub, as he remembers _Read me your favorite Keats poem_ and the weight of her head on his chest.

“You’re thinking of her, aren’t you, Ben,” she says, and it doesn’t escape him that it isn’t really a question. Ghosts or no, she can still read him.

“Does that bother you? We’ve been divorced for almost a decade. I’m allowed to think of other women. It’s probably _good_ that I’m thinking of other women. Hell, you’ve been dating that guy, whosit-whocares for like a year. Yeah, I know about him, Tormund told me,” he adds when she has the foolish notion to look surprised as she sits in the chair across from him.

“It’s fine that you are, Ben, that’s not what bothers me, I just, okay, so Tormund told Dacey about that girl at The Sloop,” she says, sitting back with the slow cross of her legs, and he’s got the attorney in front of him now, not the ex-wife. Or worse, both. He resists the urge to roll his eyes.

“Don’t be patronizing, El, it doesn’t suit you. She’s a woman, not a girl,” he says.

There is a defensive bite to his voice, and while he typically tries to keep emotion out of his voice when he argues with her, it doesn’t bother him now, not with this topic, not when she has the audacity to mention Meera.

“She’s half your age, honey,” she murmurs, and _now_ he rolls his eyes.

“Why are you here? Stop pussy-footing and just spit it out,” he snaps, sitting forward to rest his forearms on his knees. “I have to go to work, and you’re sitting here doling out criticism like I want it or need it and believe me, _honey,_ neither of those things is true.”

“I just want to be sure you’re thinking this through. You- hmm,” she says, chewing the inside of her cheek, gazing down at her hands.

Not so much the lawyer now, not even the ex-wife. A little bit of the woman he used to know a hundred years ago, maybe. Nervous young mother, wide grey eyes, a heart full of love. Benjen sighs.

“You’ve got a little bit of the rescuer in you, Ben. I just want to make sure you’re really happy, that you’re not sweeping in to save some young girl from herself or her pre-life crisis.”

“ _Rescuer?_ Pre-life crisis? Are- El, are you jealous?”

He can’t keep the incredulous grin off his face and now it’s her turn to roll her eyes.

“No, I am not,” she snips. “Can you believe me when I tell you I want you to be happy? It’s just not like you, making out in bars, _going_ to bars. I don’t want you, oh Christ, Ben, do I have to say it? You married me for Jon, I just want to make sure you’re not with this gir- this woman because you feel like she needs you, because you feel like you have to save her, too.”

His jaw drops.

“You really think that? You think I married you out of some obligation? I fell in _love_ with you. I fell in love with you _both_. What’s funny is that Meera understood that the second I said it, yet here you are 25 years later doubting its veracity. Shit like that is why we never worked out, in the end,” he says, sitting back roughly, gesturing with a whip crack sweep of his hand like he’s shooing away a fly. “You told me you fell out of love with me, but maybe you never loved me at all, if you can sit here in the house we bought together, if you can _look_ at me and say that.”

He is angry now, and it is a hard thing, to make him mad. To her credit, El looks ashamed of herself as she sniffs and gazes towards the kitchen. _I fucked her on that counter,_ he wants to say. _She said my name louder than you ever did._ But those are dirty tactics and he is not that kind of man.

“I’m sorry, Ben. Please believe me when I tell you I just want you to be happy. I want good things for you.”

She drags her hair out of her eyes with a heavy sigh and looks at him. _There it is,_ he thinks as the anger leaves him. _There she is, truly._

“I’m in love with her,” he says out loud for the first time, and he laughs with a shake of his head to think he is saying it to his ex-wife and not to the woman in question. “I’m in love with her and I’m happy. Happier than I’ve been in a _very_ long time.” El looks stunned, a rabbit that just stepped into a snare, but her recovery is quick, professional, and the woman he knew is gone again.

“Oh,” she says, hugging herself as she stands. “Okay,” she says, walking to the mantle, picking up Jon’s high school graduation photo. “Benjen Stark in love,” she murmurs, setting the photo carefully back in its place.

He wonders if it’s dusty.

“I really need to get to work, El. As pleasurable as this visit has been,” he says, getting to his feet as well, coaxing her to the door by walking to it himself.

He leans down and picks up his bag, opens the door, turns to her and waits.

“I did love you, Benjen, I really did,” she says, pausing in the threshold, the perfect place for her, neither in nor out, never truly here and never really gone.

They look at one another, physically closer than they’ve been in years. She’s aged gracefully, he has to give her that; she will always be beautiful, but it’s a beauty in which he’s no longer interested. He’s got green eyes and a tumble of curls seared onto his brain now. Benjen smiles finally, nods his head.

“I know you did, Lyanna. I do. But now we love different people, and that’s okay. Things end. Things start over, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he says as she nods, grey eyes sad, and he does not watch when she walks away.

“So you really love her, huh,” Jon says several hours later as they gingerly make their way across the flat roof of a burned up Ace Hardware.

It smells of wet soot and ash, and the combination of water and fire has compromised it. They are sounding it together, six feet apart, tapping and slapping the roof ahead of them with the flat side of their pike poles; as always it fills him with pride to see his son so diligent and skilled after such a short time working as a firefighter.

“Yes,” he says, wishing again he was telling this information to Meera instead of everyone else, but his son comes first in any scenario, and it’s vital that Jon understand, that he realizes it’s not just a fling, that it isn’t just sex anymore. _If it ever was just about that,_ he thinks. “Are you okay with that?”

The light coat of gravel on the roof has fused to the melted tar beneath it, and this paired with the deluge of water from their truck has made it slippery up here. They are silent for some time as they concentrate on the task at hand.

“Yeah,” Jon says finally, pausing in his work to stand straight and look at Benjen, who mirrors the gesture and turns towards him. “It’s weird as hell that she’s my age, but I guess it could be worse,” he says, and then he grins. “She could be younger."

Benjen laughs.

“Glad to hear it,” he says.

He returns to his job, placing one foot in front of him as he braces his body into the next tap, and he listens as Jon tells him what Ygritte tried cooking last night, laughs as Jon describes almost calling his own fire department on her. It’s the last thing he hears, he thinks, when the roof gives way beneath him, or maybe it’s the voice-cracked way his son screams _DAD_ , or the sickening sound as the metal beams slam into his body before he hits the smoking floor. It’s the last thing he hears but the last thing he thinks of is a tousle of hair, her breathless _Oh God, yes_ , and he thinks _Oh God, no._

The sun is a round pat of butter on the western wall of the sky when she pulls into her driveway, Osha and Jojen cheerfully arguing over whom versus who and if sounding like a pretentious asshole is better or worse than sounding like an idiot.

“Pretentious asshole,” Osha says with conviction, slamming the door after she unfolds her body and steps out of the car.

“Backwoods idiot,” Jojen corrects as he follows suit.

Meera laughs at them both. They glutted themselves at Wild Sage, each digging into the appetizers they ordered, a swapping of tapas and calamari, fondue and Dungeness crab, and she sipped their eponymous cocktail because the gin reminded her of him, because the taste of orange and lime and sage made her think of his cooking. And now they’re here to awaken their buzzes, to drink cocktails and if she’s lucky _not_ talk about Benjen, but then Osha’s on her porch picking up a package that rests against her door.

“Oooh, special delivery for a Meera Reed from a Benjen Stark,” she says in a singsong voice, and Meera takes the steps in one leap of gusto, snatching the large manila envelope from her friend’s hands.

“It must’ve come when we were out, or else you didn’t notice it earlier,” her brother says, climbing the steps with his hands in his pockets, and her heart _beats_ , loud and thunderous in her chest, feeling all the bigger for the pulse of excitement, the thrill of love.

“She can’t wipe the grin off her face,” Osha stage whispers as she unlocks her front door, and she says _Hey_ when Meera steps on her foot.

Jojen pours them screwdrivers with Toad on his shoulder as Meera chucks her keys and purse onto the little table by her front door, and she and Osha kick off their shoes as they head to the front room, Meera turning the package over and over in her hands, smiling to trace his handwriting, as languid and mellow as he is, slanted letters and the drag of pen marks between them.

“If you’ve committed it to memory already, go on and open it,” Osha says.

Jojen brings the drinks, one glass in his left hand and two in his right, his thumb and forefinger half dunked in orange juice and vodka as he pinches the rims together. He licks his fingers after setting them down, sits tailor style on the floor by Meera while Osha stretches out on the couch, drink in hand and resting on her chest. Toad bats at her bare toes, raises general hell amongst the pillows.

“Fine, fine,” Meera says, digging her finger into the corner of the envelope, dragging it along the seam to rip it open, and when she upturns it something falls into her lap, small with four corners and wrapped in newspaper.

“It’s a book,” Jojen says simply when he picks it up, turning it over in his hands before giving it back to her, and when she unwraps it, far more carefully than the envelope, fingernails pulling up the scotch tape, she laughs.

“What? What’s so funny? Is it a funny book? Hey, is it that David Sedaris from last year?” Osha asks, sitting up with the swim and swish of ice in her glass.

“No,” she murmurs, running her hand across the front of _Delta of Venus,_ the book of erotica she gave to Benjen as a joke, as provocation, and it’s clear he not only took the bait but rose to the occasion. “No, it’s not that,” she says, turning it over to flip through the pages, back to front, and when she gets to the first page she sees his handwriting again, the lazy swoop of pen, the tantalizing scrawl of him.

_And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom – A.N._

Meera inhales slowly, shakily, and it’s a wobbly thing when she sighs out the breath, when things like love and reciprocation fill her up, air inside a balloon, and she wonders if she will float away.

“What _is_ it,” Osha demands, setting her drink down on the coffee table with a wet click, and she slides off the sofa to sit on the other side of Jojen, who is reading the quote over Meera’s shoulder. She can hear the smile in her brother’s voice when he speaks.

“It’s a love letter,” he says in his simple, quiet way, bumping Meera’s shoulder with his. “I know plenty about love letters in the shapes of books,” he says, and she finally lifts her gaze from the book to smile at him.

“Funny choice of wrapping paper for a love letter,” Osha says, and Meera looks up as she turns the newspaper over in her hands. “He’s circled stuff with a red marker. Hey, look, it’s double wrapped,” she says, handing one piece of carefully cut out newspaper to Jojen.

“These are the classifieds from The Seattle Times,” Jojen says, and then he laughs, handing the paper to Meera. “This guy’s good. And he’s head over heels for you, sister."

When Meera looks down she sees Benjen has circled apartments for rent in his neighborhood of Ballard. It’s hot and vivid, the bright arc in her heart when she realizes what he’s suggesting.

“And _these_ are classifieds from The Spokesman Review,” Osha says, and she’s grinning when she hands it over, and there are houses for rent circled on it as well. “I think he’s telling you something, sweetie,” she says, and now Meera cannot stop laughing.

 _He likes me, he likes me_ falls away, drops like petals from a flower, and now it’s _He loves me, he loves me_ running around in her head, the delicious comfort of a needle scratching into a record as it goes round and round.

“What are you going to do?” Jojen asks after taking a swallow of his cocktail, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before setting it down. Meera is a shiver, a roil, a thunderclap of _happy¸_ and the wonderful weight of what it all means settles around her like summer snowfall, the lovely truth of it fills her ears like the buzzing of bees and the crash of waves against the seashore.

“I um, I don’t know, I don’t know. I want to be with him, that’s all.” An image rises up, coffee and tea in the morning, waking up next to him every day, rocking in silence on that porch swing of his. “I want to live with him,” she says with sudden conviction, gazing back down at the book.

“Here or there?” Jojen asks, and her head snaps up as she looks at her brother; they lived in Portland together, moved to Spokane together, have been inseparable since touching down to earth after their whirlwind childhood of globetrotting and homeschooling in hotel rooms.

“Jojen,” she starts, but he shakes his head with a smile, lifts Toad from her burrow under the pages of newspaper.

“You should go there, Meera. Seattle’s got way more to offer you than a community college library the size of a cracker box. Think of all the libraries, all the businesses you could work for over there,” he says, and she smiles at him, rests her head on his shoulder as she picks up the Seattle for rent section again, laughs when she realizes he wrote _Nice view_ next to one of the listings.

“Well, if you want to be like Mr. Cryptic here, you could print out a google map of his house and circle _that,_ before you send it to him. Maybe wrap it around a porno or something,” Osha says with a grin and a sip of screwdriver, and they’re all laughing when her phone rings. 

She takes a few hasty swallows of her drink before standing and getting the phone from her purse, and her heart skips, swoops like a gull to the sea when she sees that it’s Benjen calling.

“Shut up you guys, it’s him,” she hisses, shaking back her hair as if he can see her before she slides her finger across the screen to answer.

“I got your book and the answer is yes,” she says with a smile, biting her lip in anticipation of his voice, but then she looks with confusion at Osha and her brother when the voice isn’t his. “Hey, Jon, what’s up?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is for Swimmingfox, who always wants JEOPARDY and TRAUMA and people falling through ROOFS
> 
> (just kidding on the last one, OR AM I)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/113565289158/a-kiss-just-for-fun-chapter-5-feels)

He is standing on a black beach with his son next to him and they are holding hands, something they have not done since Jon was a boy of eight, and their palms are cool as they watch the sun sink into the sea. The dark water ripples with reds and oranges, the sky erupts into the colors of fire for the precious few moments it takes the sun to disappear. In that sliver of time, cut off the face of a clock and shaped like an orange wedge packed with the  _tick tock_ of moments, the low waves stop and a woman emerges, naked to the waist with the rest of her hidden in the water. She is swathed in sea foam, wet hair dark and eyes as green as a rain soaked leaf on a tree.

“I have to go, son,” Benjen says, squeezing Jon’s hand, knowing he is destined to swim with this creature to the bottom of the sea, to open his mouth and his lungs and drown with her arms wrapped around him.

His bare feet sink in the sand once he meets the lap of water, the lick of salt and kelp and mineral. It is as warm as bathwater; there is no difference between the temperature of the water and the temperature of his own skin.

“No,” the woman says, and she gets to her feet as the sun sinks down, down, down.  _Not a mermaid, then._  It’s black now, the sky and the water and the sand beneath his feet, though he can see clear as day. “No, you have to stay, Benjen,” she says, her wet hands pressing to his chest as she pushes him out of the water. “You have to stay, because I’m coming.”

“She’s on her way, dad, you don’t have to go anywhere, okay?” Jon says when Benjen glances back at him.

It is a marvel, to see such a grown man there where it was once just a boy, just a baby. Benjen smiles, momentarily lost in the past and the pleasure of raising him, and then the hands on his chest are dry, and there is a needle in his arm and he blinks, wondering where all of this pain is coming from.

“There he is,” says a brisk, feminine voice from above him, and for several moments it is a world of white, world of dark, white, dark, white as he blinks and focuses, blinks and focuses.

He feels stretched out and faded out, an old t-shirt left in the washing machine, something stuck in a drain, and the soak and drift and bloom of pain medication all serve to tug on the edges of him.

“Welcome back, Mr. Stark. You’ve been out surgery for a couple of hours now. I’ll go tell the doctor you’re up so she can fill you in on the procedures. In the meantime, your son will fill you in on what happened. Would you like some water?”

He thinks of the sea and the sun setting into it, is fairly sure she doesn’t mean that. Benjen shakes his head no, rethinks and croaks out a  _Yes,_  and when he turns his head and looks to the right it’s in time to see a nondescript woman give a curt nod before turning on her heel and walking out. There are brightly colored fish on her scrubs, and he tries to laugh but instead he coughs. It’s a raw searing thing, splinters in the throat and on the back of his tongue.

“Dad, slow down, you inhaled a lot of smoke down there when your air pack got knocked off. It’s not bad, and you’ve been off oxygen before you went in for your arm but still, just take it easy.”

He rolls his head to the left and his son is there with both hands around his own, the window behind him framing him in a block of city lights at night. The whole thing about the arm makes sense when he tries to cover Jon’s hands with his other and finds he cannot. There is a flare of pain up to his right shoulder and he winces, and his son looks traumatized.

“My arm?” His voice is the gravelly slur of an old drunk man and he hates the sound of it, wonders seriously now what the hell he’s doing here.

He tries to remember, but the only thing sludging and trudging through his head is something about Ygritte’s bad cooking.  _It was so funny, though,_  he thinks.

“It broke in a couple of places, one of them a compound fracture. Your ribs are kind of fucked up too, a couple of hairlines but nothing major. You’re bruised from head to toe on your right side though, and uh,” Jon’s voice fades and breaks and he dips his head to hide it, and as his son lays out the details Benjen remembers.

A close shave, the lick of death on his skin, a long, long fall and all of it in front of his son. He remembers the awkward stage of puberty in junior high when a girl told him he fell from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Now he knows what that feels like.

“Son,” he says, and Jon’s two hands squeeze his own. “I’m okay, it’s okay. It was only one story."

Jon snorts, removes the hand on top of his as he sits back in his chair to give his father a weak-willed glare. But his right hand is still under Benjen’s left, their palms are cool to the touch and it reminds him of a lovely dream he thinks he might have had.

“That’s like fifteen feet, dad."

Benjen does his best shrug with one shoulder and the scrutiny of the fish scrubs nurse when she comes back with a Styrofoam cup of ice water.

“Better than twenty,” he says, making his son’s snort turn into exasperated laughter.

He grins, or tries to, feels his eyelids droop when his son’s cell phone buzzes on the little table in the corner by his bed. Jon reaches across his own body to avoid having to take his hand from his father’s, something that isn’t lost on him no matter how mired in drugs he still might be.

“Oh good, she made it. Hey, dad, hey,” Jon says, giving Benjen’s hand another squeeze. “Dad. Meera’s here to see you, she’s on her way up right now.”

He frowns, swallows and winces again, reaching for the Styrofoam cup.

“You need to get her at the airport,” he says after a sip, and the cold water is a blessing, the soothe of silk down his throat, and already his voice sounds stronger.

He tries to sit further up and the dull ache in his arm bursts, a hammer pounding the head of a nail, splintering wood and shattering glass.

“I didn’t fly, I drove.” He knows that voice, even in this foreign environment of disinfectant and muted light, in the squeak of sneaker tread on linoleum and the clatter of clipboards in the hallway.

Benjen smiles, turns to look at the door where he knows she’ll be, his mermaid with legs, spry and sly, lovely to the touch and to the feel.

“Hey there, sweetheart,” he says, and the tremble of her chin makes him think of ripples on water, the shimmer of mirage though he knows it’s really her here, that it is no vision. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he says, swallowing a cough that makes her flinch.

“Hi, you,” she says with a furrow-brow smile, more pain than happiness there.

He wonders just how bad he looks; his arm is elevated on crisp white pillows and ice packs, is neat and tidy and judging by what Jon told him, set with a cut and dry procedure, a short steel rod and only a couple of screws.

In his periphery he can see his son stand, feels the drifting away as their hands unclasp. He watches Jon slip past Meera, how they smile and nod at one another, resting their hands on the other’s shoulder a moment until Jon leaves with his phone pressed to his ear. Meera is at his side in a second once the way is clear and the chair is empty, and he’s got her kiss on the back of his hand, on his mouth once he tells her it’s all right and he won’t break.

“You look so tired, baby,” she murmurs, scooting the chair forward so she can rest her elbow on the edge of his bed, and she props her chin in one hand while holding his with the other. Meera smiles. “Still handsome, though. And with any luck, you’ll have a pimp limp to match that pretty face.”

“I told them to be careful of the face,” he says with a closed-eyed smile, but it’s dark behind his lids without the sight of her and so he opens them again, tips his face towards her. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here,” he says, but that’s a bald faced lie and she knows it, rolls her eyes because they both know her absence would be a sting and an ache, the sorriest answer to any question he could think of.

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course I had to come here. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away from you,” she whispers, and then she shudders out a breath, blinks back tears. “When I got that call I was so sure you’d died, Benjen. I was so sure, and then it was like my heart exploded when he told me you were alive and okay. I ran outside to the car without my shoes on, I was so desperate to get to you,” she says, voice a warble as she masters herself.

He’s impressed with the fortitude and the backbone, with the clearing of her throat and the lift of her chin as she explains she got Jon’s call around 5:30pm, was on the road by 6pm when she decided even the risk of having to wait for a flight was too much to bear.

“I got here in less than five hours,” she whispers, biting her lip. “I’ve never driven so fast in my entire life.”

“I’m sorry you were so worried,” he says, running his thumb across the knolls of her knuckles.

It may nearly be eleven at night and there may still be a myriad of painkillers coursing through his veins, but it is no trouble gazing at her without drowsing. Her eyes are downcast as she watches his thumb move across her hand.

“No more falling through roofs, though, you hear?” she says with an upward flick of her eyes, with the cock of an eyebrow and the tip of her head. “The book and the newspaper and the quote were plenty enough to get me to Seattle, I don’t need a grand gesture like you did on the monkey bars back in high school,” she says dryly, and he laughs until he coughs.

“Yes, dear,” he sighs heavily, and now it is her turn to laugh, a burble in a creek, a bird in a tree. He’s getting tired and so he cuts to the chase. “I’m in love with you,” he tells her for the first time, here in the aloof glow of hospital lights instead of beneath the stars, here where fish scrubs nurse will march in instead of a waiter with wine, here where his arm hurtsto hell and back _._

 Here where she’s sitting, looking at him with unshed tears and a soft little smile, melted and sweet and her, all her. It takes some of the pain away.

“I’m in love with you too,” she says, “and I’m not leaving you again,” and it’s then that he can drift off into a drowse, it’s then that he knows he can safely step back onto that black beach again, it’s then that he knows she’ll be there when he wakes up.

 

 “If you want, you could go crash at his place,” Jon tells her a few hours later out in the hallway.

He looks like a haunting, all dark shadows and the purple of sleeplessness under his eyes, and she wonders if he will take his own advice.

“I don’t want to go, in case he wakes up again and thinks he’s all alone,” Meera says with a stretch and a twist of the waist. Her spine pops several times, the snap and crack of trying to sleep in a wood and pleather chair.

“I’ll be here, you don’t have to worry about that,” Jon says, raking back his shaggy mop of hair, and when Ygritte rounds the corner with two cups of coffee he sighs with tangible gratitude. “We’ve got it covered, though I know he probably wants to see you more than us,” and the three of them smile at each other in their little circle in the middle of the corridor.

“Thank you for being so, you know, understanding. About your dad and me, I mean,” she says, about to launch into it, but Ygritte shakes her head.

“There’s nothing to thank us for. Not when you’re giving Ben your love. There’s nothing to thank us for or be sorry about or anything,  _is_  there Jon?”

Ygritte is red hair and freckles and _vividness_ , even here in the hours before dawn wearing yesterday’s clothes, and it’s all reflected in Jon’s eyes when he looks to her. He huffs a chuckle, shakes his head.

“Nope,” he says, and the two of them take their turn nodding off in Benjen’s hospital room while Meera stretches out best she can on a loveseat in the waiting area down the hall, a wooden arm rest her pillow, the clinical air conditioning her blanket.

She wakes up sometime later with a vicious crick in her neck, one she’s rolling out as she walks down the hallway towards the bathrooms. She has an overwhelming need to splash water on her face and she tosses a few Tic Tacs in her mouth to wake herself up on the inside. The early morning light comes through the windows in a couple of empty rooms she passes by but otherwise it’s a timeless space, reminds her of that one time she went to Vegas and had no idea it was past noon when she’d been gambling and dancing and feasting all night and day. She is thusly discombobulated when a woman with dark hair and grey eyes walks past, stops in her tracks, doubles back.

“You’re Meera, right?”

She’s pretty and she’s impeccable even at this hour, and then it dawns on her that she’s his ex-wife. It just about sums up how this whole ordeal has been.

“Yeah. You’re um, you’re,” she says, and the other woman smiles a kind and understanding smile. 

 _So at least there’s that,_  she thinks.

“Lyanna. Jon’s mom,” says, tactful and light as she avoids words like ex and husband, and there is the kitty cat curve of a smile at one corner of her mouth. She draws her long hair over a shoulder, holds her hand out. “It’s nice to officially meet you. I’ve heard so much about you,” and to her credit it’s genuine, as warm as the handshake.

“Same here, of both you and Jon,” she says with a smile before her eyes widen and her mouth drops open. It’s the fatigue that makes her say it, she thinks, the lack of tact and care stemming from sleeping in a numb-legged drape on a too-small space. “Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to um, shit,” she says, but the expression of Lyanna’s initial shock at the statement disappears almost in an instant. She smiles again.

“He told you, hmm? Well, that’s a surprise, but I can’t say it’s a bad one. It’s not like it’s only my secret to tell; it’s his, too. He’s um, he’s told me how much he loves you, and I guess that confirms it.”

Meera nods, smiles and hugs herself as they both walk towards Benjen’s room, as Lyanna asks her about Spokane and her job, as Meera carefully explains that she’s moving to Seattle.  _Into his bed if he’ll have me,_  she wants to say, but she keeps that one inside her heart.

“I, um, I mean, I’ll just wait out here so you can have some privacy,” Meera says when they’re just outside Benjen’s door, and Lyanna looks over her shoulder at her, hand on the doorknob.

“Age before beauty,” she says with a smile. “I won’t be long, and then I’ll leave you two to each other, which is probably what he needs most right now,” and with a twist of the handle she pushes open the door.

Meera can just see Benjen’s head turn towards the door, the strange look on his face when he sees his ex-wife and girlfriend –  _I am his girlfriend_ – standing next to one another. She hears drifts of their brief conversation as she sits in a chair just outside the door. Things like  _Jon was beside himself and so he called me,_ things like  _I’m okay, El,_ and the one that makes her smile:  _I like her, Ben_ and his subsequent  _If someone doesn’t like her then they haven’t met her yet._

“He’s all yours, and he’s itching to get out of here,” Lyanna says when she leaves the room with a friendly roll of her eyes, one woman to another, bookends to the same man, the past and the future.

Old love and new love, the beginning and the end. Meera nods and smiles, watches Lyanna walk away a moment before standing and practically darting into his room.

She grins and he returns it, easy as you please even with a steel rod and a couple of screws in his arm. But that’s the steady and calm of him fusing together to create grit and what Meera can only describe as Not-fucking-aroundness, and they are all of them things she adores about him.

“You look exhausted,” he says, tired eyes like his son’s, tawny, scruffy beard like a cat’s on his chin and jaw.

She pretends to look affronted, hand over her heart and eyes rolling up to the ceiling as she walks towards him.

“You horrible man,” she says, coming to the left side of his bed, the safe side of his body, half draping herself on him to kiss him, to feel his heat, the safe  _real_  of him.

He is a hand to the back of her head, a kiss to the mouth, a slow exhale, _the_ answer to _the_ question.

“Nurse Ratched was in earlier and said I can get out of here by noon,” he says when she sits beside him with her cheek resting in the palm of his hand, bird in a nest, woman in love. “You okay driving me home in your zippy little car? Mine is still at the station,” he chuckles, and she closes her eyes a moment, imagining a fifteen foot fall, the smell of fire and smoke and the sound of a broken bone.

For a moment she wants to cry.

“Oh, Benjen,” she whispers, moving her face so she can kiss his palm.

“Hey, hey, now, don’t, Meera. I’m okay, it’s all okay,” and he shakes his head when she opens her eyes.

She sniffs and smiles, lifts her head and nods. Benjen digs his left elbow against the pillow and hauls himself into a seated position, leans over to kiss her, and her heart aches for the effort he puts into it, for the ill-concealed grunt of pain when he jostles his right side too much.

“Of course I’ll drive you,” she says against his mouth, resting her forehead against his. “I’d be happy to.”

She’s itching to leave this place too, to take him home and get him settled, to cluck and fuss over him, to prowl around and protect him like a guard dog.

“Good. Let’s go home then, huh?”

He draws back, looks at her like they’re standing naked before each other instead of in a hospital room, like they’re about to leap off a cliff instead of sign a bunch of paperwork and walk out into a parking lot. He glances down to her mouth and back up to her eyes. Another question, another answer.

“Yeah, baby. Let’s go home.”

 

“Well aren’t you mister high and mighty and lazy to boot,” a voice calls from the street before two slams of car doors.

Benjen watches Jon and Mance stride up the short, steep yard to where he sits with his arm in a mesh sling. Meera pops her head out from the back of the U-Haul she, Jojen and Osha drove over, grabs the edge of it as she swings herself down to the driveway. He is irritated not to help because it’s been two weeks since the accident and he can movie his arm relatively well, but he’s been sitting there nursing an iced tea with a sleeping Toad on his lap for an hour like an invalid.  Mance almost makes him scowl if it weren’t for the grin Meera flashes him as she walks up to the porch, wiping her hands on the thighs of her jeans.

“On orders of the lady of the house,” he says with a nod in her direction.

Mance glances back as he takes the stairs two at a time. Jon is already a wave and  _Hello_  before disappearing inside to help, though it’s more likely he’s there to grab some of the beer and pizza they ordered as a thanks for the help moving Meera in.

“Oh?” Mance says as he turns around, giving her a look of appraisal like he’s never met her before though he’s met her twice now.

She lifts her eyebrows and looks back, making Benjen grin.  _Bold Meera,_  he thinks, lifting his eyebrows when her gaze flicks his way. Mance turns back to look at him.

“And do you always do what you’re told?”

“When it suits me,” he says, leaning back to watch Meera as she climbs the porch steps as well. “I find it usually does, these days,” he cups her face with his left hand as she leans over to kiss him, a slow slide of her tongue in his mouth as he kisses her back.

He has half a mind to try and coax her into his lap, but then there is a loud groan of exasperation. Benjen breaks the kiss with a laugh, kisses her again because it’s the most he’s been allowed to do all day, because the taste of her is too fine to deny.

“Jesus, it really is all about dirty sex dinners over here, isn’t it,” Mance says, and there is the sound of the front door opening and the soft grunt of bodily collision.

Benjen glances around her in time to see Osha grin and step away from the impact of Mance’s chest, and she is giving him a look of the same frankness he himself likes to hand out.  _Good, let them sink their fangs into one another,_  he thinks. He gets his earlier wish when Meera turns and sits down on his thighs, angling her back against his left shoulder and into the corner of the low, squat arm chair he’s in.

For a moment Mance and Osha are a mirror of one another, arms across their chest, his sterner stance mocked by the cock of her hip and the curl of her grin. Her wild hair is tied up and half falling in her face, and though it’s a watercolor sky and the sun is a partial bleed through the clouds, she’s got a sheen of sweat from the humidity and task of hauling box after box into the house. Benjen can only imagine where Mance’s thoughts might drift to if he lets that stare wander.

“Dirty sex dinners?” Osha says, her gaze a drop and lift as she sidesteps away from him, he of the piqued interest and amusement and the fold of his arms across his chest as backs up two steps away from her. “I know  _all_  about dirty sex dinners. Do _you_ , mister what’s-your-name?” she says before glancing at Meera, her eyes widening ever so slightly before she spins around to trot down the stairs.

“I, huh,” Mance says, standing in front of the yawned open front door as he stares after Osha, a hand on the back of his neck and a mystified look on his face. “Here, let me help you with that,” he says after a few moments, jogging down the stairs when he can see her hauling an oversized box out of the U-Haul.

Meera cackles and kisses Benjen’s cheek, and he drags another few kisses from her, mouths together, the smell of her skin and the lovely weight of her here, here where she belongs. _With me._

Her brother and friend stay with them for the rest of the week, finding room on his many bookshelves for her books and unwrapping her collection of vases, bantering back and forth as Jojen corrects Osha’s grammar and she finds ways to torment him in retaliation. Meera and Jojen drag a small table out onto the back porch where they eat dinner one clear evening, and he has the pleasure of her cooking for him, the amusement of an hours-long conversation outside with Meera on his lap and her hands in his hair.

Mance finds his way over two more times before Osha pushes him up against the wall to kiss him, and for the rest of the visit she spends more time texting than talking. It is blissful and it is fun, even with his arm paining him. There is always the smell of something on the stove, the sound of Patsy Cline or Ella Fitzgerald interspersed in the music of his own choices, the bicker and argue of siblings and friends. It is fun but there is a modicum of relief when Jojen and Osha take off for the airport, side by side in a taxi and cheerfully snapping at each other about movies, because now it’s a taste of what life with Meera will be like, when it’s just the two of them.

There is something deeply satisfying when he opens the medicine cabinet and sees a toothbrush next to his, when the bathroom smells like sesame oil and shampoo, when he wakes up and she’s beside him. What used to be a house of ghosts is now a house of muted conversation in the middle of the night, the lovely stuff they call pillow talk. It’s a house where he reads with her feet in his lap, a house of fresh flowers in stained glass vases and a shelf full of herbal tea. It’s a house with a confident kitten stalking shadows and batting his ankles when he walks down the hall. It’s a house where he’s happy.

And oh, he’s happy.

She’s up and out of bed by the time he wakes one morning. He’s been on medical leave long enough that it takes him a second to remember what day it is when he glances at the clock on his nightstand. Sunday morning and just after eight. He takes a slow and careful assessment of discomfort as he stretches his arms to the side, is pleased to note the absence of that sharp shooting pain, and it is with vigor when he sits up. Rain drums the roof overhead, patters and runs down the window above his bed. _Our bed now,_ he thinks, swinging his legs over the mattress to rest his feet on the rug, and it’s then that he hears the clatter and mutter of Meera down the hall.

Benjen grins, heads out into the kitchen in time to see Meera bent over to peer at the coffeemaker, Toad surfing the ride on her shoulder with expertise. She is in that lovely robe of hers and it’s ridden up, showing the stretch of thigh and curve of calf, the tap of her toes to some beat only she can hear. He knows no matter what he does he’ll startle the hell out of her so he simply leans against the wall, gingerly folding his arms across his bare chest as he watches her as she figures out the machine. She doesn’t like coffee as much as she does tea, so he knows this act of service is for him, and he swims and sinks and drowns in love as he gazes at her, laughs when she turns around and gasps so loud her cat hisses.

“Christ almighty, you gave me a fright,” she says, laughing herself when he pushes off the wall and steps into her, kisses her soundly after she lifts Toad from her shoulder and sets her on the floor. “Good morning, honey,” she says, sing-song and teasing, playful and light as whipped cream as she wraps her arms around him, her hands a smooth slide across the low of his back.

“It’s all right, I guess,” he says, grinning when she huffs and scoffs. “I knew I liked waking up next to you, but waking up to find you puttering around in here is just as nice. Almost,” he says, lowering a kiss to her shoulder after pushing away her robe.

She gasps when he presses his teeth into her skin.

“Benjen, it’s- I mean, _oh,_ ” she says when he hums noncommittally, when he walks her backwards until the counter stops them both. “Your arm, baby,” she says when the southern roam of his hands finds itself at the backs of her thighs.

 _She knows me,_ he thinks with a grin as he kisses his way from shoulder to throat to jaw to mouth.

“So get up there your damned self,” he murmurs.

She’s a breathless giggle when she posts herself up onto the counter, when he unties the silk sash at her waist and pushes the robe away. The suffering and painkillers worked in tandem to steal away their sex life over the past few weeks, and the tease of her bent over, the wind of her arms around him and the realization that she is well and truly _here_ with him now all combined to make him hard as a rock now.

They have the sound of rain and the scent of coffee when he finally pushes inside her, when she whimpers and sighs his name, her legs a lock around him. She braces them both with a hand to the counter behind her to keep him from using his right arm too much, arches her back and lets her head sag back when he finds his rhythm.

“I love you,” she pants out, and he groans in mind-numbed bliss to hear it, buries his face in the warm place between her breasts, drops kisses just above her heart. “Oh God, Benjen, I love you.”

“I love you too,” he just manages to breathe out, a final gust and grunt of adoration before he comes, before he says her name over and over again, mouth to her heart, drenching himself in the knowledge that it beats for him, that Meera knows him and loves him as much as he loves her.

“Benjen,” she says.

“Meera,” he answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL DAMN, MAN. THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE. Everyone who was like, um what the fuck is this ship and still decided to embark anyways. Y'all out there who like me were like um fuck yes I will go down with it.
> 
> Thank you to Janelrenee and Michael1280 for the inspiration and help, and thank you EVERYONE for reading, and for commenting and liking these two. I gotta be honest, they're now in my top three OTP. My 3TP? Is that a thing? Do I say that, or does it just sound like I'm talking about toilet paper?
> 
> I LOVE YOU ALL.


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